/usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound. As of 11/1100,
it was out-of-date with respect to the Maestro chip on my laptop.
Note that the SoundBlaster card has three cable interfaces: blue, yellow and green. The jack on the cable that goes to the speakers is blue, but it needs to plug into the green interface (the one nearest the middle of the card).
With the standard SoundBlaster card installed, run the
sndconfig program. It'll take care of the
details. You have to run it as root, and if you do it in a
window with the foreground font color set to yellow, it won't
work. Sigh. When you run it, sndconfig will say that the sound
card is a Creative ViBRA16X PnP. It'll play some
test sounds to help you know it's working.
At least once, Linux booted without the "midi FAILED" message,
but when I played sound files, they were truncated. When I play
a .au file, about 1 second plays, and then it
stops. Since then, I have booted, gotten the "midi FAILED"
message, and then sound seems to work fine.
The Sound-HOWTO addresses this with the following paragraph:
6.10. Partial playback of digitized sound fileThe symptom is usually that a sound sample plays for about a second and then stops completely or reports an error message about "missing IRQ" or "DMA timeout". Most likely you have incorrect IRQ or DMA channel settings. Verify that the kernel configuration matches the sound card jumper settings and that they do not conflict with some other card.
cat xyz.au > /dev/audio
To play a sound on the laptop, /opt/oss/play.
Some good, short-duration sound files can be found in /usr/local/lib/xemacs/xemacs-packages/etc/sounds. For a web site with sound files, try http://sunsite.sut.ac.jp/multimed/sounds/sound_effects.
To play a CD, insert a CD and find the CD player on the KDE menus.