Those of you running Mepis systems have ALSA installed. Trying it out is as easy as booting the 2.6 kernel. The auto detection software probably grabbed the OSS drivers for a 2.4 boot, but you can change that with your /etc/modules file.
The ALSA drivers are found in /lib/modules/2.4.25/kernel/sound/ or /lib/modules/2.6.4/kernel/sound. The older OSS drivers, which you may be more familiar with, were in /lib/modules/2.4.25/kernel/drivers/sound.
To try it out you need to figure out what sound card you have. The commands lsmod and lspci do that for you. In my case, lspci returned:
0000:00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation nForce2 AC97 Audio Controller (MCP) (rev a1)
lsmod showed me that I was using sb or nvaudio, I don't remember anymore.
A little google searching taught me that snd-intel8x0 was the ALSA module for my sound card, a nasty little integrated sound card. Putting "snd-intel8x0" into my /etc/modules file forced that module and ALSA to run.The result was not perfect, but it was much better than OSS. I no longer got "can't set rate" errors for playback, I got many more options in the mixer. It also recorded, which OSS would not do. The quality, for one reason or another, diminished and playback is now jumpy. I think this is because the modules were statically compiled and other libraries changed with an upgrade. Silly me. Those of you running Mepis unmodified from the CDs or who compile from source may not have this problem.