Hi, I'm not too sure about ultra-80 or debian testing, but on ultra-5 ( with CS4231 ) and woody, sparc-utils has to be installed and /etc/default/audioctl has to correctly set. The CS4231 chip-set is not exactly compatible with the Desktop mixers!
I've been using for a few months, a small GUI app I wrote and I've just uploaded it to http://www.acarlab.com/aCL-pub/linux/linux_support.html#SparcAudioCtl Hope it's useful to some and I'd like to know what other Sun-sparcs it works on. Please, also can somwbody tell me what exactly is the purpose of the 'monitor' channel on the CS4231 chip-set. All the gain controls just appear to be in series! - arvind
