So, the symptom right now is that the speaker is turned all the way up, and I can hear only a faint beep when I go into the sound application (System/Preferences/Sound and Test for ALSA or ICE1724 (ALSA). If anyone has any knowledge of why the situation is so bad, what happened between Gutsy and Intrepid, and most importantly, if it looks like it's going to get any better, I would be interested in hearing about it. I recognize that the problem is not the fault of the linux community, but I'm having such a horrible user experience with this, and it has lasted so long for me, that I want to be heard. but, alas, as unimportant as sound seems to be through my experience, ALSA is attached to everything. I even considered ditching ALSA and going with OSS4.1, as at least Intel ICH8 is listed in the supported hardware, there. For the record, a PPA 1417v w/ VIA VT1723 ( Tremor ) chipset is not old ( ).

I just thought with such a simple card, what could go wrong? It even looked outdated. My fault - I didn't make sure that it worked with ALSA when I bought it. Guess what? I now have two devices that aren't listed as compatible with ALSA. I spent so much time 'fixing' the issue (over and over) with things that would work only until the next update, and randomly stop working after rebooting, that I got fed up and bought a new card, the simplest I could find, so that I wouldn't have this issue. But that soon died with Intrepid, which ushered in a plethora of new sound issues. My SigmaTel STAC9271D Intel chip worked like a charm. In Hardy, it looked like all of my problems were a thing of the past. I've run linux for more than 8 years and spent 6+ without sound.

Due largely to sound being the number one issue that I've had with linux across all distros. I can't begin to express how disappointed I am with the condition of sound in Ubuntu.

Drivers tremor vt1723