Once I got CentOS up and running it was time to look at the smaller things that didn’t work out of the box, like sound. I looked at a lot of websites and troubleshot for a long time before finally figuring out that I just needed to install a more recent version of ALSA for my on board sound card to be recognized. I even tried booting to my Ubuntu live CD to see if the sound worked, so I could use that as a starting point. Even Ubuntu 8.04 live CD didn’t recognize my sound card.
Installed new version of ALSA following these instructions:
Edit the repository list
vi /etc/yum.conf
Add this to the end of the file:
[atrpms]
name=EL $releasever – $basearch – ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/el$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable
gpgkey=http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
exclude=*kmdl*i586*
includepkgs=*alsa*
Import the atrpms key:
rpm –import http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
Found these instructions on the Linux Laptop Wiki