I had a dialup connection so I could search the internet! There was a bunch of mailing lists back then where you could ask questions, also sometimes I checked the USENET (alt.os.linux.*) and there were some excellent how-tos... It seems there still are some how-tos (I'm not sure if they are the same as they were back then):

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Sound-HOWTO/x320.html http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lame/LAME/linux-admin-made-easy/inst...

Also the Slackware linux had a nice installation guide:

https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:install

Finally, some configurations were explained in the corresponding man pages of each util.