No sound in Ubuntu 10.10

Question

I'm not able to hear any sounds from my PC after installing Ubuntu 10.10. Videos and mp3 files are all playing but no sound comes out of my PC. I formatted my previous Ubuntu 9.04 and did a clean install of Ubuntu 10.10.

Output of lshw -c sound:

saran@saran-desktop:~$ sudo lshw -c sound  
PCI (sysfs)  

  *-multimedia              
       description: Multimedia audio controller  
       product: 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller  
       vendor: Intel Corporation  
       physical id: 1f.5  
       bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.5  
       version: 02  
       width: 32 bits  
       clock: 33MHz  
       capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list  
       configuration: driver=Intel ICH latency=0  
       resources: irq:17 ioport:e000(size=256) ioport:e400(size=64) memory:e8181000-e81811ff memory:e8182000-e81820ff  

Answer 1

I also experienced something similar in Xubuntu and realised that there are different places to change the volume and to mute / unmute the audio. I'm sure it's more or less the same in Ubuntu. So check:

• The volume control in the task bar. Also right click and open the detailed settings. Is the correct audio card selected as output ?
• Search for alternative mixer settings in the menu. Most likely under Multimedia
• Maybe try alsa-mixer from a console
• Check if there are any hardware swtiches. Very unlikely if it's a PC, on notebooks there are sometimes hardware switches that overwrite any OS settings

Answer 2

Toshiba Satellite Pro A120 - had no sound in 10.10. Did an upgrade to testing release 11.04 (press Alt+F2 then type update-manager -d). I now have sound. 11.04 is looking promising -- after all I'm only playing with it so am happy to go with an unstable testing release.