ASUS p4b533 m/b sound card driver/compile question

This ASUS P4B533 motherboard has a C-Media 8738 sound chip. The asus ftp site (ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/asus/misc/audio) has a file called cmlinux.zip that hopefully allows the s-pdif functions (etc) to work. The make instructions in that file's readme do not jive at all with the directory structure I found on my system . For example, the readme says: "Backup the Config.in (sic) and Makefile in the sound driver directory(/usr/src/linux/driver/sound)"

But, nothing is there. There is no 'driver' directory.

However, it seems that what I want may be here: /usr/share/alsa/cards/CMI8738-MC6.conf

Being some what new to Linux*1, I really don't have a clear plan for compiling this correctly. And I *really* don't want to blow anything up. Has anyone any experince with this particular sound card and Knoppix/Debian?

P.S.: dmesg shows:
PCI: Found IRQ 9 for device 02:03.0
cmpci: found CM8738 adapter at io 0xa800 irq 9
cmpci: chip version = 055
cmpci: Enable SPDIF loop

Well OK! But, shouldn't it work?

tia,
some putz

*1 - but not to C, I started writing little C progs 15 years ago. Unfortunately, writing in C was something I didn't need for work, so I left it behind for a while, you might say.