I turned off Plug and Play support in my BIOS and it vastly improved Red 
Hat's ability to find and address my devices.

(Note, turning off Plug and Play doesn't really turn off P N P as most 
cards these days are either PCI or AGP and both of those are Plug and 
Play no matter what.  It's those pesky 16 bit cards or motherboard 
components that run on that bus that are the problem.)

Anyhow, it helped in my case, YMMV.

Micah
Victor Odhner wrote:

> Red Hat 8.0 identifies my sound card but
> can't open /dev/dsp* (I forget exactly
> which dsp).  My user-id has sole access,
> with full read/write permissions.
>
> My printer is also recognized, but won't
> activate.  I get a generic printer with
> some apps, but any print gets lost in the
> bit bucket.
>
>