audio problem

[me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org (Matthew Gillen)]

dan moylan wrote:
> ibm t41 laptop running ubuntu 8.10
> 
> my audio for such as timidity, play, etc has ceased to work.
> terminal beeps sound fine.  the sound up/down buttons seem
> to function normally.
> 
> a month ago, the sound worked fine -- now it doesn't.
> could there be some software switch i've inadvertantly
> thrown, or is this likely to be a hardware failure?

Does Ubuntu use pulseaudio?  If so, this info from the FAQ might get you
going, or at least provide more info:
http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/FAQ#Troubleshooting
> Stop pulseaudio (run "pulseaudio -k"), and start it again with "pulseaudio
> -vv". That will print verbose output of the daemon startup. I

A stop-gap would be to have everything (gnome, individual apps, etc) just use
the ALSA drivers directly.  It's configured differently for all apps, but at
this point most apps support ALSA and pulseaudio (and esd, arts, etc).

HTH,
Matt