Using Ubuntu 7.10 on a Toshiba Satellite L45 with an Intel HD Audio sound card. After screwing around with alsamixer for a bit I got sound to actually come out of both speakers, but it still dies when I try to adjust the volume from using the volume control icon, and I cannot get it to come back without a system restart. I'd like a fix that won't break software updates too. Thanks in advance.

Installing the latest version of the alsa-driver, alsa-lib and alsa-util solved some weird problems for me. On another note, have you tired restarting the sound system from the system settings-sound panel ? Also, you might want to try the command line alsa utilities, as they may give you an error messege when they die, that might give you a better clue about what is going on when the sound system crashes.

Let us know how it goes....sorry I could be of more help....

David

There is a file

Documentation/sound/alsa/ALSA-Configuration.txt

in the kernel source (maybe available elsewhere) which documents many tweaks for different sound hardware. This involves loading the sound driver with special options. For my Gigabyte micro-ATX m/b I had to add a line

options intel-hda-audio model=6stack-hp

to the end of the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base. Command 'lsmod' should show which driver you are currently using and 'lspci' will show the hardware. Googling all this together with your computer model name might help.

As the previous post suggests, having the latest everything installed is good too.