Yesterday I spent a few hours down at the One Laptop per Child office and got sound working on the laptop. Marcelo had to make a patch to the ac97 codec and once I ran the maze to find the source for the kernel, apply the patch and load the module, sound worked! David Woodhouse helped with teaching me how to get the module loaded. It’s been years since I had to build anything kernel related.
We haven’t tried the input side yet, but odds are that it works as well. We’ll know more over the next week or so.
For the record, the first .ogg file that was played on the laptop was a remix of Depeche Mode’s Stripped.