Ok, I see I have been going about this wholly wrong.
Infact the OSS4.tecm was hard to find. But I have put it away.
After looking at the posted replies I unloaded the OSS modules and worked with ALSA modules. About 6hrs of reading posts, and unproductive attempts to get sound up, I went back and READ the replies.
No sound device in dmesg. lapci -v did not show my device. Several devices but no sound device.
Then I read this again.
In the end those are the "management" apps, the first critical thing is getting the correct kernel module loaded, and that is tied to our kernel version.
So a lsmod showed no sound module. I have osscore and oss_usb listed.
I can modprobe oss_cs461x and that then shows in lsmod output, but does not activate my soundcard. The listing of the modules in OSS-modules-2.6.33.3-tinycore.tcz shows a cs461x and a cs4281. Neither work with my hardware yet.
I had this sound working on DSL as a crystal 4232 using options similar to
There are some particularities about using the CS4237 on Thinkpads with alsa, wrt module options and BIOS settings. You might want to research if for OSS any similar is the case.
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/CS4237
osstest tells me I have no audio devices available, it looks like your hardware was not recognized by OSS
So If I have this right this time I technically have sound working now from the kernels standpoint, but to get the hardware to play sound I need to have a module that works with oss and my crystal 4232. I believe that is why I had the oss4.0 in the first place as it seemed to be able to work with this hardware.
If I try to modprobe oss_csxxx port=0x530 etc etc - with either of the oss_csxxx modules, the module will not load at all - it returns ... unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter.
And just why do I go back to OSS? Should I instead focus more on ALSA?
So I would again appreciate a point in some direction of research or just to be told how badly I am off base yet.