I had not been able to get my cheap Yamaha sound card to work
using the 2.6 kernel in Knoppix. It worked fine with the 2.4 kernel though.

I booted with: knoppix26 2 alsa etc.. and the alsa re-configured the drivers
for the card fine. I tried the sound and it worked even though it was set
to use OSS instead of alsa. I reset it to use alsa and the sound works
better than before.

Hope this helps somebody else also.