No sound with Aureal Vortex 8830

I have this problem in Mepis 6.5 (32bit) that I do not have any sound with my Aureal Vortex 8830 card. It works fine in Windows 2000, but nothing will give in Mepis.

Doing cat /proc/asound/cards gives:

0 [au8830 ]: au8830 - Aureal Vortex au8830
Aureal Vortex au8830 at 0xbd000000 irq 17

on dmesg | more I did see:

[17179585.856000] Vortex: init.... <6>Real Time Clock Driver v1.12
[17179652.176000] vortex: IRQ fifo error
[17179652.836000] vortex: IRQ fifo error

On a reboot I turned on PnP OS in the BIOS. Now the audiocard is init'ed (no more fifo errors) and should be working fine. But for that I still got no sound. The IRQ moved from 17 to 18.

But, lsmod does show drivers loaded:

snd_ac97_codec 87076 1 snd_au8830
snd_pcm_oss 37408 0
snd_mixer_oss 14336 1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm 62856 5 snd_au8830,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer 18308 1 snd_pcm
snd_page_alloc 7560 1 snd_pcm
ac97_bus 1920 1 snd_ac97_codec
snd_mpu401_uart 6144 1 snd_au8830
snd_rawmidi 17952 1 snd_mpu401_uart
snd_seq_device 6412 1 snd_rawmidi
snd 45928 11 snd_au8830,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_mpu401_uart,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device
soundcore 7008 1 snd

So I checked kmix, all sound was muted. Turned them on.
Then I checked alsamixer, which will mute its sounds on all channels when you turn them on in Kmix. And vice versa, by the way. Very irritating. (any way around that? Or which one should I use?)

I told all players to use digital sound on CDs and where possible, to use PCM as the main sound option. I don't have the external sound-lead between the DVD player and the audiocard installed. Shouldn't need to either.

So what's next?
(Besides trying Mepis 7.0beta2)

Jord.