Hello, I am a relative n00b to Linux (4 weeks steady, but been tinkering
with various distros for 2 years). I am having some trouble that I can't
seem to find a reasonable solution to, and I have decided that compiling
a kernel is probably in order.

The problem BTW... I had sound in everything using my i810 onboard AC97
chipset on hte OSS driver. But, it would cause a LOT of crashes in Quake
3 as soon as I spawned on a level. ALSA didn't care much for the chip. So
I picked up a C-Media8738 based PCI card, which sndconfig says isn't
supported. So I set it up in ALSA and have sound in *everything* except
Quake 3 and Enemy Territory. But I can't set the card up in OSS, even
though Mandrake sees the card just fine, so I'm stuck with ALSA and the
easiest solution I've found thus far is to just recompile my kernel.

I've been through "make xconfig", "make dep", "make clean". I am now at
"Read the following file (to gain some knowledge about kernel
building...)
"less /usr/src/linux-2.4.21-0.13mdk/arch/i386/config.in"
and I have become a bit confused!

Now, the instructions do not say to edit this file, so I assume this is
just a summary of my kernel modules at this point?