Getting sound to work on debian

I had installed alsa but on doing a alsaconf I found that the sound card wasnt being detected. lspci had listed the card as unknown. Looking up the vendor/card id database online I found the card description which I used for looking up the sound card list at http://www.alsa-project.org/ . This was listed with some special compilation instructions. So I downloaded the lasted driver(1.0.10) from the website and did the following

cd /usr/src
mkdir alsa
cd alsa
cp /downloads/alsa-*
bunzip2 alsa-driver-1.0.10
tar -xf alsa-driver-1.0.10
cd alsa-driver-1.0.10
./configure --with-cards=hda-intel --with-sequencer=yes;make;make install

Then running alsaconf it detected the card and configured it. A final word on permissions. The alsa driver creates /dev/dsp and /dev/sequencer but the files have permission 660(rw-rw---)
which means that normal users cannot access it. The user needs to be added to the 'audio' group for sound to work. This is done by logging in as root and doing
gpasswd -a user-name audio