Thank you for the suggested fix. It didn't work for me, seems that some fixes work for some laptops, some for others, and some not at all.
I spent some time reading all the many forum posts on this problem, and many tries later, after redoing the Linuxpartition and trashing the MBR and reformatting and starting over many times, I think I will just do with XP for the grandson's school homework and online teacher assignment connectivity.
Then, when the new distro comes online in late April, we'll see if it fares any better for the dual boot.
what exactly isn't working?.. does any sound work? at all??
I find odd conflicts start if I have the gnome system sounds enabled. What updated just before the breakdown?.. I would make a wild guess it was a kernel update. check in
/var/log/kern.log
there may be clues.
Post me the output of lspci -v and lets have a look at the sound hardware closely. It might be required to build alsa with the needed config instead of attempting to auto detect.
guess you found this on your travels (again a few things ARE NOT explained proplerly and ASSUME people know how to use things like grep)
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingSoundProblems
The links contained.. especially the one near the top about known problems with karmic .. are informative.
(I wouldn't use ubuntu if somebody paid me, but it's kinda similar to debian so I will have a guess at what broke)
Hazel hon.. I was chatting with one of my old time pals on irc last night and he suggested asking these guys over here.. http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/
I had a good look round (long time member, but forgot I was) and they seem like a very helpful bunch.
