An on-board sound card with VIA chipset, as you have correctly guessed. I don't know what you exactly mean by a "kernel drive", though.
As I mentioned, when I increased the virtual channel settings to 4 (default 0) problems came. KsCD had no problems. Noatun/kaboodle playing MP3s had serious jitter and XMMS played them with the wrong tone (just like a vinyl record playing at a wrong speed) that I'd found it better to mute the sound card as it's too hard for my ears, although the blocking problem is indeed solved as advertised. Possibly VSC may work with a better sound card, but I don't know. My experience is not an acceptable one so I set it back to defaults.
Is the Linux sound architecture very much different from that of FreeBSD? I haven't heard about similar problems with sound device blocking on Linux before.
Yes, I use Gnome 1.x on SuSE. Possibly a correct choice for not upgrading to 2.x as Gnome/Gtk+ 2.x apps are simply too slow. At least that's really slow on my FreeBSD partition. I need to tweak the .gtkrc settings to use fonts in my locale or text won't appear correctly. Are there more well-documented guides/manuals of the .gtkrc series file format online? I have tried googling but it seems not much can be found, especially those concerning fonts/fontsets. I found
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/g...rce-files.html but not exactly in a good format for understanding it and it just gives very brief description of each option and doesn't totally explain the mechanism, like when .gtkrc or .gtkrc-2.0 are used respectively etc.