There's not much to say about OSS and ALSA except OSS is old and ALSA is new.

Go into Mandrake Control Centre --> hardware --> HardDrake

HardDrake will scan your hardware: Click on your sound driver (mine's a Soundblaster Live! but it should work for anything)

Click on Run Config Tool
An informational dialogue will pop up. Inside you'll have something like this:

If it is using the OSS driver and you know the chip of your card (the sb live uses the emu10k1 DSP) then select the other one (they're not very well labeled but trial and error worked for me) Volia: you'll have an ALSA driver running instead of OSS driver.

Make sure you have all the XINE libs installed for ALSA and give it a whirl. All going well, you'll have The Matrix playing in no time.

Ok, first of all make sure you have both texstar and plf added to urpmi. head to http://plf.zarb.org for an easy way to do this. After that, you need to install all of the plugins for xine for DVD's. Check here: http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php?t=1922 look about half way down the page for a post from DragonMage. All of the files you need to get DVD playback working. Just su to root and urpmi them from a console. It works great. Trust me.

ok.

i have checked out ermpi and thats good! i will do that when i get my goddam winmodem working i will check the lists and hope that i will get what i need of the cd's. if not it looks like i will have to do it manualy....SHIT!! (oops..i meen oh goly gosh! )

thanks for the reply!