Can anyone direct me to a list of Linux distros that support OSS4 out of the box, i.e. they have it in their repositories rather than requiring you to build it? So far I've found only Yoper, PLD, and Arch Linux; the first's website is down right now (and hosted on Debian, which is not encouraging), the second has an obnoxious install process and OSS doesn't seem to work properly on it, and the third, though reliable, has far too many non-functional packages in its repositories.

(Since FreeBSD did not pan out at all, what I'm looking for is a reasonably stable distro... Something like Debian, just with OSS4 in its repositories. Yes, the sound quality is that much better than ALSA with the current version.)

for those (like me) that didn't/don't know what OSS4 is:
http://www.4front-tech.com/oss.html

As for a list of all distros that have this....I am not aware of any "reverse lookup" like this. I can imagine distro maintainers making decisions daily about what to keep in their repositories. I'm not sure how one would maintain a database to keep track of them all. (I take it back--Google could certainly do it--but mere mortals????)

Never mind... For once, things went right. I found a way to get better sound quality from alsa.

So, some advice for Linux users with Intel HDA onboard audio - find out what model your HDA is, and put in your modprobe.conf (or modprobe.d, or wherever):

where $MODEL would, for instance, be acer if you're using an Acer laptop such as mine. For some cards, at least, this should increase sound quality significantly.

Looking at the link pixellany gave, they supply .deb and .rpm packages, so I assume that should cover the Debian derivatives, Redhat variants and SuSe variants.