I've seen mention of this somewhere else but I don't know what the fix is (although it sounds like one does exist from what I surmise).

I recently installed Debian (testing) on my laptop - a HP Pavilion dv8000. Everything works fine except one thing - the audio. It works but the volume can only be controlled with the PCM audio slider (not the normal volume slider). It's annoying to have to open the audio controls every time I want to mute or change volume - the buttons on my laptop work, but they change the master volume (which as I said doesn't change the actual volume for some reason).

Is there some setting or something where I can tell the system that these two sliders need to be switched or something?

here's that particular line of the "lspci" output if anyone cares:

I had the same problem with Ubuntu 7.10 and I solved this by going to :

System > Preferences > Sound

At the bottom of the "Devices" tab, make sure the 'Default Mixer Tracks' is set to HDA Intel and then make sure that PCM is selected/highlighted in the box below.

D'oh! Thanks, that worked! I thought it would be something with the driver or something. . . can't believe I overlooked that.

For anyone else with the same issue, you also need to right-click on the Volume Control icon in the corner and click "Preferences" and make sure these same options are selected.