Have anyone of you ever had knowledge of an HDA-intel chip working in a Linux OS. I've seen an Acer Aspire and a Lenovo M52 with these chips and nothing you can do to them will make sound, except booting windows. It works the first time, every time.
I don't need a lot of "have you loaded this or that," I just want to know if it's possible. Do you have positive, first-hand knowledge that a HDA-intel makes sound, plays a cd, or plays a You Tube video in a Linux environment. Any flavor!

Yes it surely works without a problem on Arch Linux and Gentoo using alsa.

Well, I'm not impressed with Gentoo, I tried to install a working OS for three days and had to abandon the attempt because of a bug affecting glib-2. gtkdocize failed. It's slow and complicated, it reminds me of some other bloated, bulky hard to upgrade software from a company in Washington.

In my opinion, doing without sound is better than putting up with emerge.

I'll try Arch Linux?

Gentoo works nicely here (fully up-to-date) and it is not bloated at all. It can be exactly what you want it to be, but anyhow I'm sorry to hear you experienced those issues with it. Yes, you can go and try Arch Linux and unlike Gentoo you can have your Arch Linux up and running within 30 minutes or so.

You can start with Arch Linux beginners guide.

Well Archlinux did not do any better than the others.

The system loads, network configures, sshd comes up and loads a base system, from the cd-rom I guess.
The package system was shat - I could never get it to load an Xorg or Audio file package from "extra" repository. It would load from core but never from extra -- ergo no sound or video.

All the attractive, well organized manuals and help documents were useless trying to load X11. This makes the whole thing useless.

Wget did load and I could download any of the Xorg packages from "extra" and manually install, it takes forever and you have to keep up with the dependencies on a legal pad. I tried all their init shat, the inits worked, after a forever entrophy, but the pacman downloads from "extra" didn't!!!!!

I tried to get on their forum, but that's an exercise in futility also.

No video, no sound - two days down the tubes. On to Ubuntu. Good-bye Arch
Linux! If I can't run Ubuntu without Gnome or KDE it's for the trash heap also.

Well, this question is solved, there are at least two distributions that provide a useful graphic interface with sound upon installation. Fedora 17 is excellent, also openSuSE 12 provides a nice graphical interface with sound operational upon install.

All the distributions give you an operational base system, but I found these two to be useful to a computer user, who doesn't have to be a Linux expert. I loaded, installed, rebooted (updated) and played my music cd.

Thanks for the comments, pds