Sorry for the long post. Total Newbie here, running Debian Sarge/KDE for 2 months, (once a friend installed it, once I installed it myself)...everything ran perfectly.

sound worked the whole time until 2 days ago, I happened to do several things that day:
1. Installed Amarok, didn't like it, uninstalled it.
2. Installed kaffeine to play dvds
3. Blew the ventilation ports with canned air to get rid of dust.

I watched dvds with sound, listened to Juk, everything was working fine. when I rebooted the next day, /dev/dsp is not found upon kde startup. sound won't work. i ran alsaconf and it didn't detect a soundcard. I uninstalled kaffeine, reloaded alsa, tried again, no card detected. aRts does not detect it either and outputs to null. I even uninstalled KDE (yikes!) and reinstalled it. nothing. ls mode shows the following.

Module Size Used by Not tainted
soundcore 3940 0 (autoclean)
input 3648 0 (autoclean)
i830 68476 1
agpgart 46244 11 (autoclean)
r8180 44876 1
ieee80211-r8180 23820 0 [r8180]
ieee80211_crypt-r8180 2132 0 [ieee80211-r8180]
ds 6996 2
rtc 6440 0 (autoclean)
af_packet 13000 1 (autoclean)
yenta_socket 10756 1
pcmcia_core 46372 0 [ds yenta_socket]
e100 50036 1
ehci-hcd 18412 0 (unused)
usb-uhci 23344 0 (unused)
usbcore 62924 1 [ehci-hcd usb-uhci]
ide-cd 31296 0
cdrom 29828 0 [ide-cd]
ext3 81068 1 (autoclean)
jbd 42468 1 (autoclean) [ext3]
ide-detect 288 0 (autoclean) (unused)
piix 9096 1 (autoclean)
ide-disk 16800 2 (autoclean)
ide-core 108568 2 (autoclean) [ide-cd ide-detect piix ide-disk]
unix 14960 120 (autoclean)

My guess is that installing amarok or kaffeine changed a conf file so that something else uses the sound card (aRts?), i just don't know exactly how to check. I am tempted to backup all my data, do a debian/kde reinstall from scratch (don't want to go the easy way and use ubuntu or mandrake) but I don't want to go through the process of setting up my wireless card again (my friend helped me). I definitely don't want to ask my 'friend' again for help. Is there a way I can test for the soundcard outside of kde and xwindows?

Alsaconf won't work if the card blew up, or the drivers are built in.
Have you tried alsamixer? and in the console... cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp as root (then type CTRL+C to cancel that after you tested it)

In the modules, besides sound core, I don't see any sound modules that pop out.

Can you specify what type of card it is? Your computer is fairly closely related to mine. (I have P30, and the A's are sorta close to the P's I find.)

Thanks for the reply
best I can tell the soundcard is a DirectSound 3d. I believe that it is integrated into motherboard. on dmesg I see the message "i810_rng: RNG not detected". Everything else seems fine (no other such messages). during the startup, I see the "setting up ALSA" followed by "(not loaded)"

cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp displays "No Such Device". alsa mixer can't find snd_ctl_open.

It is possible that the card did blow up, it'd be hard to tell since the day the sound went out i'd done a couple of things dealing with sound (the amarok and kaffeine installs). A few months back the cheap connector on the audio interface board went out, and I cracked the laptop open and replaced it. Perhaps I didn't put the connector back on straight enough, or who knows. maybe there are some modules that need to be reloaded (i am not even so sure what that means, i'll look it up.) with some many ways of doing things in linux, it's all a big learning experience.

my apologies, i wasn't thourough enough in finding out my soundcard. lspci | grep audio comes up with "Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 03)"

right now I am reconfiguring alsa, i'll let you know how it goes.

screw it, i've tried pretty much everything i've found on forums and mailing lists, nothing seems to work. time for a clean install. the problems is not the soundcard.

I would be willing to go on with the debug.

however, if you feel strongly about reformatting, go ahead.

Not so much, but this is a personal computer and as such I don't have time to debug, research, and learn by trial and error. It sounds like the wrong attitude, but I still plan to keep Debian on my desktop for the hobby aspect of it. That way if I screw it up i can fix it at my leisure.

I'll give Ubuntu a try on the laptop to see if it's the cat's meow like everyone says. Can't wait to attempt at burning the ISO cd

I see.

You will be please with Ubuntu, it's probably what you are looking for.

Trying to say on the topic. I've reloaded debian, xwindows, kde and synaptic. I think that's about what I need. sound works just fine.

Tried Ubuntu, I don't think it's for me. I couldn't get into Gnome, and it just felt a little dumbed down. Not to mention, my laptop felt like an early 90's macintosh.

Thanks everyone for your help. Eventually I will learn what I need to solve issues like this one.