alsamixer - no mixer elems found
 

After going back to base 9.1 my sound worked. Then I upgaded alsa to 0.9.8 and the kernel to 2.4.26 and the module in /etc/modules.conf failed to insmod.
Upgraded the 4 alsa files to 1.0.4 from current, cleaned modules.conf and ran alsaconf again to detect the snd-intel8x0 sound card.
Then running alsamixer I get "no mixer elems found"

Looking at the alsa buglist and
http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showt...hreadid=125840
Alsa 1.0.4 seems to be broken with the Intel8x0 driver - affects many laptops.
Ah well, I will have to wait for next weeks alsa release.

And no better with the new alsa 1.0.5. on 2.4.26/current
Alsaconf sees the hardware
alsamixer c 1 works and the pcm can be unmuted
lots of errors about alsa lib pcm broken pipe

I made it by reinstalling alsa-utils and alsa-base and running "alsa reload" from terminal. Maybe alsa reload was the only necessary.