Team,
I searched through this topic and also on other topics under "Hardware and Booting", and the trick of running "alsaconf" in a root terminal does actually work to detect soundcards and activate sound output.
However, the issue remains: I also used to run a Knoppix 3.7.x series CD, and sound worked perfectly in a variety of desktop and laptop machines with different sound HW without any cheats at all. After I switched to 3.8.x, I need to run alsaconf every time I boot from the CD to get sound.
Something was broken along the lines, in the move to 3.8, that totally broke sound at from boot time. I also tried several cheats, like acpi=force, alsa=driver, pnpbios=off, etc, and nothing worked for me.
Any clues if this could be fixed in, say, 3.8.3, or 3.9.x ?

Regards,

Ricardo