[Techtalk] Sound card gone missing - OSS/ALSA woes

[Gwen Morse]

I left my Fedora 16 laptop in the hands of my minimally techy husband
while travelling and he's managed to break something.

Here's what I know...I mentioned before leaving that I had been
reading about the OSS/ALSA history and was thinking of switching over
from ALSA to OSS when I got back.

He decided to "surprise" me by doing it himself. He deleted all the
ASLA packages and ran an OSS bat file installer. It didn't work (no
surprise there) and then he went and reinstalled all the ALSA
packages. It still doesn't work.

The audio card is listed in lspci, so I know the system still
recognizes it. It's also listed but greyed out in Phonon (KDE GUI
sound manager):

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset
Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)
        Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1a13
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 22
        Memory at f6a00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
        Capabilities: <access denied>
        Kernel driver in use: oss_hdaudio

The internal audio analog stereo is also greyed out in Phonon. That
was my normal fallback when the actual sound card wouldn't work. I do
see that the oss driver is the one the system is trying to use (kernel
driver is oss_hdaudio)

What I'm not sure about is what stage it's at (maybe the OSS install
was corrupted, maybe it just needs an additional configuration step).
I haven't done much (possibly any) sound card management and it's been
a good 5-7 years since I've build modules into a kernel (so those
skills are a bit rusty).

At this point I'd like to know how to clean up what hubby did and
restore ALSA (for now). Then I can read over everything and possibly
get support directly from the OSS folks (apparently we paid for the
drivers) when I'm ready.

Thanks in advance for any help provided (or even just taking the time
to read this).

Gwen