First of all, that is ONE CUTE AVITAR
From the "credit where credit is due" dept., it's by Mark Reidesel, and part of the default background image on Slax-Live, which is another live Linux CD.

First off, I'm not really sure of any benefit(s) you get from installing ALSA over OSS. What are the benefits?

I've compiled and installed ALSA from source twice now on Red Hat (as newer versions came out), so I'm aware of the source code issues you mention. (I installed ALSA because I wanted to run the Soundgarden sequencer.)

But what I really meant was, Debian Woody includes pre-compiled ALSA packages on CD 2, so why wouldn't they exist for Debian Sarge and Sid? After looking through the package list on the Debian web site, the answer to that seems to be that "official" pre-compiled ALSA drivers only exist for specific kernel versions, 2.4.16 and 2.4.25.

There's a page about compiling your own kernel and installing ALSA on Debian here.

I did successfully get ALSA working on Debian Woody using the pre-compiled binaries for kernel 2.4.16 - although I'm probably going to disable it in the init scripts, since OSS works just fine and I want to use kernel 2.4.18. There were some configuration issues I had to manually deal with, however! Oh, well.