With the later Alsa i8x0 drivers, the audio from rat sounds slightly
robotic, that's about it.
One interesting thing is if I use your Alsa patch and have an Alsa driver on
a 2.4 kernel, the rat GUI comes up, but if I only have the OSS drivers, the
rat GUI doesn't comes up. If I have no Alsa patch and only OSS drivers, the
rat GUI doesn't come up. If I rebuild with Redhat's gcc 2.96, the GUI comes
up regardless. I suspect it is some kind of gcc 3.2.2 optimization bug. I'll
probably release a new AccessGrid RPM statically linked against Alsa lib and
compiled with gcc 2.96 next week.