I have a thinkpad 600E here and the only module that ever gave me sound was to use the soundblaster pro one. That was the case with any distribution and even then I got problems - no sound after suspend/standby and any PCMCIA activity caused major buzzing from the sound system.

Part of the problem, as I understand it from speaking to IBM on several occasions and also SuSE, is that IBM had different revisions to what was nominally the same sound system. This causes real headaches for getting sound to work - I'm not sure why these problems have so much effect on linux where Windows sound generally worked (although far from perfectly).

I had tried the OSSfree and ALSA systems and with various distributions (Redhat, SuSE, mandrake, Knoppix) without any luck. In the end, I gave up with the idea of sound under linux and simply pretended the machine had no sound functionality at all.