New Computer Ubunting Away

A friend of mine sent me a Dell Optiplex 740, complete with box only and no hard drive, only 1 Gb RAM. I happened to have two sticks of RAM in my dead HP which fit the bill, and an old hard drive which never too a liking to Windows XP. Turns out I was running Ubuntu 10.04 on it, in 64-bit flavor. Well, that works for me. I turned the computer on and it ran. That's all I wanted. I upgraded to the latest LTS of Ubuntu.

I have two problems. One is that it boots up with sound muted. I have to go to Settings - Sound and unclick the Mute box. Nobody seems (yet) to know what I'm doing wrong. The other is that I prefer to run SRWare Iron, and the package they put together for Ubuntu 12.04 is busted. I've tried a number of things to fix it, nothing yet.

I'm still a n00b. I downloaded UnNethack, and am still trying to figure out what to do with the zipped file. I extracted it to the desktop, and there is no information I can find telling me what directories to move which files to.

Any help you can give me, write me at zaivalananda@gmail.com or comment here. I have posts up at the UbuntuForums, and tried to post to Iron Forum but the admins have not approved it yet (been a week).