lost the sound in PCLinuxOS after the large updates
 

I had lost the sound in PCLinuxOS after the large updates recently, and I did try all the most logical things, but no luck. It is installed on a sata external drive connected to a 06 AMD Athlon Gateway with XP multiple booting with several other Linux. The sound works in those others.

It seemed at first that the sound problem was due to that ALSA type Intel HDA driver since switching to the OSS mixer driver worked in Fedora. But then for my PCLinuxOS updated 2007, I found that it only has the ALSA and not that other OSS mixer driver available, so I fixed it by selecting the master channel as; PCM rather than as; master. So what does PCM stand for in Linux sound, and why did it work ? ALSA is this; ( Advanced Linux Sound Architecture ). I think that the OSS is; Open Source Sound, right?

Some reading for you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_System

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-code_modulation

Regards.
The trooper.