Kernel

  I reccomend to read the Battery-Powered mini HOWTO and the chapter about kernel recompilation on the RedHat manual before proceeding to recompile the kernel for your notebook. While making xconfig (or menuconfig or whatever you want to use) pay attention to the following:

• turn on networking support but turn off the normal Linux network card drivers, including the ``pocket and portable adapters (see the PCMCIA-HOWTO).
• When the configuration script reaches the character devices section, the default setting for full APM BIOS support in kernel version 2.0.30 or higher is (stripped from the Battery-Powered mini HOWTO):
  

  		  Advanced Power Management BIOS support: Yes
  		  Ignore USER SUSPEND: No
  		  Enable PM at boot time: Yes
  		  Make CPU Idle calls when idle: Yes
  		  Enable console blanking using APM: Yes
  		  Power off on shutdown: Yes

• Enable PPP, SLIP or PLIP, depending on how you want to connect.
• In the Sound section make the following choices:

  		  #
  		  # Sound
  		  #
  		  CONFIG_SOUND=y
  		  CONFIG_AUDIO=y
  		  CONFIG_MIDI=y
  		  CONFIG_YM3812=m
  		  # CONFIG_PAS is not set
  		  CONFIG_SB=y
  		  CONFIG_ADLIB=m
  		  # CONFIG_GUS is not set
  		  # CONFIG_PSS is not set
  		  CONFIG_MPU401=m
  		  # CONFIG_UART6850 is not set
  		  CONFIG_UART401=y
  		  # CONFIG_MSS is not set
  		  # CONFIG_SSCAPE is not set
  		  # CONFIG_TRIX is not set
  		  # CONFIG_MAD16 is not set
  		  # CONFIG_CS4232 is not set
  		  # CONFIG_MAUI is not set
  		  SBC_BASE=220
  		  SBC_IRQ=5
  		  SBC_DMA=1
  		  SB_DMA2=1
  		  SB_MPU_BASE=330
  		  SB_MPU_IRQ=10
  		  DSP_BUFFSIZE=65536
  		  # CONFIG_LOWLEVEL_SOUND is not set

The OPL3 chip is not detected. Nevertheless Kmid, a program belonging to the KDE desktop enviroment, can play many MIDI files without problems. The drivers OSS/Free provided by https://www.4front-tech.com are supposed to improve the performance, if compared to the standard Linux drivers.