multiple soundcards, setting primary soundcard

[Karel Vervaeke]

Hi, I'm going to need a little help with my soundcards.
My 2 soundcards (one on-board and one pci card) get loaded correctly:

karel at donkey:~ $ lsmod|grep snd
snd_es1968             29188  1
snd_intel8x0           33068  2
snd_ac97_codec         59268  2 snd_es1968,snd_intel8x0
snd_pcm_oss            48168  0
snd_mixer_oss          16640  1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm                85540  3 snd_es1968,snd_intel8x0,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer              23172  1 snd_pcm
snd_page_alloc         11144  3 snd_es1968,snd_intel8x0,snd_pcm
snd_mpu401_uart         7296  2 snd_es1968,snd_intel8x0
snd_rawmidi            23232  1 snd_mpu401_uart
snd_seq_device          7944  1 snd_rawmidi
snd                    50660  16 
snd_es1968,snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_mpu401_uart,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device
soundcore               9824  1 snd
gameport                4736  3 snd_es1968,snd_intel8x0,analog


All my attempts to get my computer to use the es1968 card as primary 
card have failed so far.  Most attempts consisted
of these three steps:

1) edit /etc/modutils/alsa-base
2) run /sbin/update-modules.modutils
3) reboot
4) run alsamixer (with no arguments) to see which card is selected by 
default, every time the intel8x0 card is selected.

Currently, my /etc/modutils/alsa-base contains this:

karel at donkey:~ $ cat /etc/modutils/alsa-base
above snd-pcm snd-pcm-oss
alias snd-card-0 snd-es1968
alias snd-card-1 snd-intel8x0

There's a whole bunch of sites talking about using multiple soundcards 
with alsa, but they all look alike, and they're not really helping.
Some of these sites talk about using various combinations of "alias 
snd-slot-[01] snd-card-[01]", while some other sites are talking about
sound-slot-[01] instead of snd-slot-[01].

What should I try next?
Karel