There's a few howtos on alsa and debian kernel compiling if you google, like:
http://www.desktop-linux.net/debkernel.htm
http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/linux/debian_alsa.html
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2949&page=1
http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/tut...ernel-pkg.html

BTW, seems to be a matter of taste while I set a kernel version when compiling as in:
fakeroot make-kpkg --append-to-version=.160604 kernel_image (use any date)
And so my lilo.conf contains:
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.6-16.06.04
label="Linux-2.6.6"
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