Hello again:

Never mind the Xine question, I got it running - had the wrong decoder, and 
the wrong version as well.  For some reason d4d doesn't work with Xine 
0.9.13, only 0.9.12.  And the instructions on the d4d site were somewhat 
misleading, implying that d4d would overwrite the inp_dvd driver, which it 
didn't.  (Perhaps these notes were obsolete.)  And I had to change the drive 
and the audio device specifiers in the Xine config file.  And surprisingly, 
the audio worked even though I left it se to "oss."

Actually, I had an easier time getting Xine running than the alsa sound 
drivers, because I neglected to read the INSTALL doc under alsa-drivers, and 
hadn't run the "snddevices" script.  Therefore the config utility "alsaconf" 
couldn't see my sound card, which was quite baffling for a while.   I suppose 
they should have a trouble shooting section under alsa-utils for lazy people 
like me who neglect to read the directions until something goes wrong.  But 
besides that - and besides the trouble of finding the correct kernel source - 
it was a very easy install.

Vaughn