No hardware mixing in mandrake linux

Okay this is the deal. I have recently upgraded to mandrake linux 10.1 community. I have compiled the latest ALSA drivers 1.0.6 and i have the AC'97 audio codec which linux sees as intel8x0 for some reason. Now i still have no hardware mixing! This is really annoying me because im actually starting to wonder if linux really does support hardware mixing at all. In windows i can mix up to 33 channels for crying out loud. Anyone have any suggestions what i can do in order to obtain hardware mixing? Something other than creating scripts myself because that i really have no knowledge of.

I should really post this on one of the linux forums, but before i do i think ill give it a shot here. ;)

I solved the problem. The AC'97 codec doesnt have hardware mixing in linux. Fortunately there are various sound systems in linux like EsounD, ALSA, OSS, and Arts. Players like xmms and mplayer and Amarok can use several and so it still is possible to hear more than 1 sound at a time. Arts can even do software mixing and comes with KDE. There is also OpenAl, a sound system for games like Unreal tournament 2004, that uses software mixing. Some programmes, however, dont have support for these various sound systems and take over the only channel available. An example is the game Chromium. In that case you cant have anything else running that makes noise.