AC '97 .....
OUCH !! I've been there. Problems! I had the same problem with an MSI board with that Via sound chipset in Mandrake 8.2
The news I have isn't good. I was able to use it with Mandrake 8.1, but I didn't find the performance to be what I considered 'reasonable' . O.K. 8.2 came out and I did a clean install and got the same problem as you have. CD o.k., everything else 'no way' Seems they use two different type of sound structures in Linux , that seem popular. The prefered seems to be the one they call OSS stands for Open Sound System, The other is called ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. Right now, it seems that OSS may be more popular. On stuff that don't work, a lot of Linux docs. refer you to
www.alsa-project.org Supposedly ALSA does have a driver for this chipset, but, at least for me, I found a major headache, trying to plop it in Mandrake. (It's not a click and go thing). I got impatient after a while, re-evaluated, and bought a Turtle-Beach Santa Cruz, sound card for that machine. .....
Well... as popular as the 97 seems to be getting, you'll probably see the major Linux distros handle a good built in driver for it before too long. I didn't have the luxury of time though. As fast as these linux distros come out, maybe support will be sooner than you think. After you fool around with this os for a while, you'll be amazed at how fast Red Hat and Mandrake, come out with a new Distro. My solution may be more than you want to invest, if your just getting your 'feet wet' with Linux right now. You'd have to make sure you can disable the onboard sound to use another card anyway. Sorry S.C. I took the easy way out on that box
http://www.provantage.com/YVOYE003.HTM