Dell Latitude C810, ESS Maestro 3s, and Debian Lenny = no sound

I installed Debian Lenny on my old Dell Latitude C810 in the train room. With Debian Sarge, sound worked just fine, but Lenny just doesn't do it. Kernel modules are all loaded, and look right. Logs have

Jan  8 17:02:53 doc kernel: [ 2579.448816] firmware: requesting ess/maestro3_assp_kernel.fw

and nothing else interesting.

After some googling I learned that I'm missing the firmware, but it no longer comes with the Debian ALSA packages due to license violations of the binary-only firmware.

http://wiki.debian.org/snd-maestro3 has instructions on what to do to get sound anyways. Basically one needs to download the firmware tar.gz from the ALSA project's FTP server, and build it manually, then copy to e.g. /usr/local/lib/firmware/ess, reload the maestro3 kernel module, and voila, we have sound.