debian/knoppix soundcard difficulty

[Stephen Burke]

So now I've got knoppix-GIS installed on a hard drive here (which is 
interesting because I've never done it successfully with debian and the 
installation is ridiculously easy compared to a debein install), but the 
SBlive soundcard does not seem to want to work.

dmesg shows me:

emu10k1: EMU10K1 rev 7 model 0x8066 found, IO at 0xe000-0xe01f, IRQ 5
ac97_codec: AC97 Audio codec, id: <83><84>v88(Unknown)
spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7.
emu10k1: SBLive! 5.1 card detected

so clearly it's being found.

modinfo soundcore shows me:

filename:    /lib/modules/2.4.20-xfs/kernel/drivers/sound/soundcore.o
description: "Core sound module"
author:      "Alan Cox"
license:     "GPL"

so, apparently the kernel module is there.

kmix does not have the sound muted or anything (as in mandrake), and 
googling does not seem to be helping much.

Since this is my first taste of debian, I'm still rather lost, but would 
be much happier lost with tunes.

Certainly the word "spurious" up there doesn't look too good, but I'm 
not sure what it means.
any suggestions are most welcome.
What am I missing?

Thanks,
S.