I've been facing troubles with my audio in Debian 3.1, kernel 2.6.8-2-386. Previously I installed kernel 2.4 and things went fine for audio.
Any ideas?
OSS is gone in 2.6 kernel. You need to switch to using ALSA. You will want to see docs specific to your distribution. Sound works out of the box with most hardware on most distros. Also, you might try a kernel older than 2.6.8, but steer clear of 2.6.12, it has sound issues.