Jailbreaking a vintage sound module

Recently I had the idea to use a Receptor as a VST development platform. 
It has a stable hardware (what about O.S. stability and reliability?) 
and 'wine' works well with the great Hermann Seib's 'vsthost'. The 
problem comes with the sound card it is equipped with. On board there is 
a VIA ice1724-ht connected, from the card housed on the PCI bus, through 
a GPIO with a daughter board that provides analog and digital inputs and 
outputs, optical ADAT and MIDI. (same options are available at onboard 
motherboard's audio chipset but that resouce is disabled on BIOS and 
outside connectors removed by manufacturer ;-) ).

With the tools provided by the operating system (RedHat v.8) I am bound 
to use the only working resource outside the custom software provided, 
the headphone!. This sound card is not recognized by other kernels, I 
tried to install several distros, than the one provided by the 
manufacturer, a custom kernel version 2.4.19.

So I would like to know and ask this community of users if there are 
known kernels able to make that particular sound card work fully.

Otherwise remains the metal-bashing solder solution of enable the mobo 
soundcard and wire its outputs to the ones at the daughter card...

Thanks for reply and greetings from Italy