A sound card can be easy or hard to detect. It depends on who made it. Many Sound Blaster Compatible
cards in fact are not compatible with the Linux Sound Blaster driver. Other cards will be compatible with a
driver you would never have thought of.
There are multiple drivers for Linux. Currently the kernel comes with its own set of sound drivers, plus the
OSS/Free drivers. These will support most generic cards. In the installation program, or when compiling your
kernel, you can pick the sound card that matches yours, or the one that matches the chipset on your sound
card (for example, the Sound Blaster PCI64 card uses the AudioPCI chipset).
If your sound card is not supported by the kernel, you will need to get another driver. 2 popular ones are
ALSA available from http://alsa.jcu.cz and OSS/Linux available from http://www.opensound.com
OSS/Linux is a commercial product that supports a lot of cards not available in other drivers because of card
specification restrictions. You will need to see the list of supported cards in each driver and pick the driver
you need.