no sound with 4.8 & KDE

[Walter]

Hi all,

    After building a new kernel with pcm, and doing
"sh MAKEDEV snd0" in the /dev directory, there is
still no sound from an old Gateway with some kind
of PCI Ensoniq card.  This is my first crack at
setting up an X11 server and sound, so I may be
missing something obvious.  I've tried running
xmms, "artsdsp xmms", with and without esd, zinf
from a command prompt, and cdcontrol.  This all
has been built a couple days ago, with 4.8 a week
old CD-ROM built via FTP, and KDE via FTP direct.
The sound output driver selection in xmms shows
nothing for the audio and mixer devices, and
selecting the alternates (/dev/dsp & /dev/mixer)
does not make it work.
Also, if it bears on the issue, I couldn't get
the nVidia driver to run - it failed without an
error message in the log file (only info msgs) -
so I used Vesa which causes some garbage to be put
on the screen upon initialization, but then works
thereafter.
TIA.

Walter