It was easy to find, eBay had plenty to chose from. The previous card
was also a Creative Labs sound card, but a newer one, and 8.04 simply
would not recognize it. I slipped in the old sb16, and I had sound
immediately. If only the machine were stable.

> This could be a resource issue, Firefox 3 is pretty resource intensive
> for an older system, how much RAM does it have? Do you get any error
> messages or does it just stop? And is it ONLY firefox or is it any
> app while you are playing via the sound card?

Any app seems to do it. It has 384M of RAM, and it is a bit slow
running FF, but it is usable. We set it up for the kids to use, as we
certainly can't afford a new machine now (of course, dad would get the
new machine, and the older ones would trickle down. :-) )

> It isn't the best solution, but then all you have to worry about is
> sounds from a web site, since Ubuntu won't be popping off with any
> sounds.

Of course, the kids want to listen to mp3s and youtube, so there'll be
sound playing most of the time. I remember that back in the day, this
machine was more than capable of playing sound smoothly with no
dropouts while doing other work, but of course, RH 5.x and Netscape
weren't as much of a load on the system...

I found out how to pass options to the card, it's in the
/etc/modprobe.d/sound file. I feel pretty stupid not already knowing
that, I did at one time in the past, but it had slipped my mind.
Unfortunately none of the fixes I found Googling it work. I did learn
that it's not an interrupt conflict, but I'm not sure it's not a port
address problem.

Right now I have the card disabled by commenting out the appropriate
line in /etc/modules and the machine is stable, but I really want the
sound to work.