great install; ALSA, X, modules questions

[Scott Campbell]

To Ubuntu devs: great job. 

Just finished installing the Oct1 daily on my Thinkpad 600E. That went
flawlessly, except it did not detect my linksys 10/100 USB NIC during
install. Once X was loaded and I looked at the HAL device manager it was
there, and I added it in the Networking dialog. Well done. Smoothest
Linux install for me ever, nice replacement for Debian/testing.

I have a few issues left though. I've done some initial googling for
answers, but perhaps people here can help.

1) ALSA is not detecting things properly, but alsaconf (which has always
worked well) disappeared after refreshing the repository and updating
this morning? This is a finicky soundcard, but I've never run a 2.6
kernel, so there might be something I've missed. I know ALSA is
integrated now, and the FAQ suggested that older ISA cards need special
treatment, but alsaconf worked well in the past.

2) Redraw on X is slow: ie: moving opaque windows is pretty herky-jerky,
upscrolling gnome-terminal is painful, etc. xfree 4.3.0 on
debian/testing with Gnome 2.6 worked fine, things moved around quite
smoothly. The XF86Config files are almost the same: the old one had
'v4l' and 'xtt' modules and the new one has the line BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
in the device section. Are these likely culprits, or is something else
maybe getting in the way? Or is Gnome 2.8 just slower?

3) I'd like to use Thomas Hood's tpctl and thinkpad module driver. I was
rolling my own kernels with make-kpkg before, but I'd like to stick with
the simplicity of Ubuntu, and stick with the kernel images provided. I
grabbed 2.6.8.1 sources with synaptic to compile the module only, but of
course, I'm running the stock 2.6.8.1-2-386 kernel, so modprobe doesn't
find the new module. Can somebody point me out of this, I'm not a real
hacker, just a user. Is there a better way to compile a specific
module/driver and use the stock ubuntu kernel?

Thanks. 
Scott