bGears Enspirer problems / proper procedure for updating ALSA drivers

I decided to step away from OSX/Solaris boxes for a change and build myself a Linux box. The last time I did that was back in 1995 with Slackware. Things sure have changed. :-)

I am running Etch and the problem I have is that the oxygen driver for my bGears card is not included.

This latest driver is now part of the recently released 2.6.25 kernel. I was able to build this kernel and get it running, but I had problems where the machine would hang and the audio would get stuck in a "stutter" mode where it just loops a portion of what was just playing. The kernel had other problems, so I ditched it and looked into building a custom 2.6.18 kernel from the Etch release.

I was able to get a custom kernel running, and worked next on getting the drivers from the ALSA site built and installed. Struggled for a long time with unresolved symbol errors, until I noticed that the location of the kernel modules under /lib/modules/2.6.18 does not match where the ALSA driver makefile places them. For example, the existing kernel modules would be /lib/modules/2.6.18/kernel/sound, but the new drivers were being placed in /lib/modules/2.6.18/acore. I did see a configure option for tweaking the module path, but some files were still not being placed in the proper locations. Removing the old ones and installing the new ones did not work either, as I got errors about certain modules not being found. What did end up working is that I replaced all of the existing kernel modules with the new versions in the old locations, as well as installing the new modules in the locations used by the ALSA makefile.

So after all of that rambling, I have three questions:

1. What is the proper procedure for updating the ALSA drivers when there is no existing package for them? I did follow all of the procedures from the ALSA site.
2. And which man page do I need to read to get modprobe to find things properly?
3. Things run fine for awhile, but still end up hanging in the same fashion as when I was running the 2.6.25 kernel, which leads me to think it's a problem with the ALSA driver. How would one approach debugging this problem?

I program in C for a living, so that's not a problem, but all my stuff is in userspace and kernel debugging is a new frontier for me. :-)

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Peter