My Compaq N600c has an ESS Allegro chip that doesn't seem to do well with an unadulterated install of Debian "Etch". Among other things, the most annoying is that after waking from standby, the volume level is almost inaudible, regardless of kmix settings. Restarting resolves it.

I don't know whether this is a KDE related, ACPI related or other type of problem. I'd love to fix it, but if anyone knows how I can at least restart the sound modules/drivers/whatever without having to reboot, it would help. All the better if you know of a solution to the original problem too.

If you're using alsa, I typically just run alsaconf as root (or sudo). It re-initializes my sound card.

Unfortunately this didn't reset it for me. Any other ideas? Anyone?