Since his Laptop uses the ESS 1869 Soundchip, the configuration needs to be done using the corresponding OSS-driver. Trying to auto-configure the soundcard using the ALSA-sound wizard or alsaconf from the console failed. Using modprobe in combination with disabling the pnpbios at boot worked.

Typing  dmesg on the console after an unsuccesful alsaconf attempt displayed the advice to disable the pnpbios on boot.

On reboot, I entered puppy pnpbios=off on the bootup screen, then used the modprobe command to load the sound module for the card from the console, using this line:

modprobe snd_es18xx isapnp=0 port=0x220 mpu_port=0x330 dma1=1 dma2=1 irq=5 fm_port=0x388

Depending on hardware-settings, different values for irq, ports and dma may be necessary, information about this should be found in the bios.

To permanently use these settings I added the bootcode puppy pnpbios=off to the file /boot/grub/menu.lst in the kernel line of my puppy-install, which now looks like this

kernel /puppy301/vmlinuz pmedia=idehd psubdir=puppy301 puppy pnpbios=off;

and the modprobe command to the file /etc/rd.c/rd.local, which resulted at proper sound configuration upon bootup.