i have a problem

My dell Inspron 3500 runs an old version of knoppix, ver 3.6. this is intentional, in order to keep processing speed up.

The probelm is i have no sound. I do have midi sound, but not sound from my other speakers. or are they the same speakers?

My other problem is i have never worked with drivers in any form of linux. On my laptop there are several drivers, and the one i want to use is nm256_audio.o

first: i need to know what driver i am using. (are they called modules in linux?)
second: i need to know how to tell the computer that it should be using nm256_audio

third: this is tricky, i have to tell the computer that the sound card (a neomagic soundcard, i'm still figuring out what type) connects like a usb device. I know that doesn't make sense, but a few online sources i read says that is why knoppix doesn't know how to find it.

if i have something horribley wrong, please tell me. i'm pretty horribly lost at all the linux stuff, but i'm learning! in the meantime, i'm going to examine the soundcard in my windows partition and see what i can figure out about my sound card.

anything you can tell me will help!