multiple output from single soundcard

[twill]

I am new to the whole sound scene and so am thoroughly confused by much of what most people are saying in a good majority of the forums.

What I want to know is this... IS there a way to take a multiple channel sound card and use each channel to output something different than the others.

For instance, I would like to have 3 "zones" I will call them. In one zone, the soundcard can be playing DVD playback, in another zone someone could be gaming and in the third zone someone could be listening to music (mp3/ogg/etc)

I'm trying to do all of this in linux and unfortunately only have one pci slot available so multiple sound cards will not acheive my goal.

Any ideas for a newbie to the forums?

Thanks in advance.