Sound problems (alsa, sb live)

Hi everyone !

About one year and a half ago, I had a Pegasos 2 G4 machine, with a SB Live that
worked great under MOL + OSX (panther) with the alsa drivers, even with games
such as diablo 2.

Now, I have a new peg2 and a new SB Live (that works perfectly under MorphOS),
but now, under MOL, the sound doesn't work properly. (both 2.6.11 and 2.6.8 -
sb live and alsa drivers.

Here is what happens for instance if I launch starcraft :
- at the first launch it usually works perfectly (well, 50% of the times)
- I play one level then the sound suddenly ceases to work, and the mouse pointer
(well, MOL) freezes one second, then works again, and so on, until I quit any
app that makes sound... I have to restart MOL to get a little sound again.

--> this is something I experienced, I think, last year, with the onboard sound
(via 82cxxx or something) and ALSA.


I didn't give up and tried the onboard sound chip with the alsa drivers, as some
friends reported it to work. However, if I manage to get sound with the alsa
driver with, let say, xmms, I get none with MacOnLinux that fails to use the
device and falls back to the OSS driver. I also get an error message in my
dmesg, that I wrote below. With the OSS driver it doesn't work at all. I just
get one bit of sound once in a while - but MOL doesn't freeze.

What is stranger, so with the onboard sound + alsa, is that, each time I reboot,
alsamixer tells me it's using the sb live... Though meanwhile I had launched &
configured the via chipset with alsaconf. I checked scripts etc, it "seems"
normal...

Well, I'm kinda lost... Any idea ?

I would really prefer using the sb live as I have the feeling its sound is much
better. (I use it on hifi system)

Last year I remember I had to disable (in /etc/modules) some OSS drivers to make
alsa work properly. I tried to do so with this new installation, but it makes no
difference, they seem to get loaded anyway - much more automatic stuff and much
longer booting time than my former debian install, one year ago.

Last but not least, I tried all those combinations under both the 2.6.8 and
2.6.11 kernels with the same results :'(

Thanks for listening ! :)


Edit :
To be more precise :

- I tried to remove the sb live, it makes no difference
- I tried the 2.6.11 with modules I downloaded with apt-get and 2.8-16 kernel
with modules I compiled, and with modules I downloaded, same result
- with the onboard sound + alsa, I get the messages :

* via 82 audio probe of 0000:00:0c.5 failed
(at boot time)
* alsalib pcm_direct.c (snd_pcm_direct_init_slave) requested auto format not
available, ... etc (when launching mol)

Everything is up to date.

Hmm, also, an alsa conf, with my 2.6.8-16 kernel, when unloading the via 82xxx
alsa module, once the mol-modules are loaded, triggers a kernel panic !

Well, I'm completely lost ! :-/