On 1/19/2010 11:58 AM, greg wm wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Mr. MailingLists
> <mailinglists at soul-dev.com <mailto:mailinglists at soul-dev.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 1/18/2010 9:36 AM, greg wm wrote:
>      > i've both gutsy and hardy installed in separate partitions, i'm
>     running
>      > the hardy kernel.   i can chroot into the gutsy partition, and
>     firefox,
>      > xmms, and xfce4-mixer are all able to play and control sound, so the
>      > hardy kernel sound clearly works fine.  in the hardy partition
>     however,
>      > firefox and audacious are mute, and xfce4-mixer comes up as a blank
>      > window with no controls.  no packages were forced, i'm quite sure all
>      > dependencies were satisfied as a matter of course (tho how do i
>     verify
>      > that?).  still, dependencies notwithstanding, my guess is that a
>      > critical package or three are likely wanting.  any suggestions?
>
>     What about alsamixer? Whats your sound card identified when running
>     lspci or dmesg?
>
>
> alsamixer fails to launch, says
> alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such file or
> directory
> lsmod contains
> snd                    56996  12
> snd_es18xx,snd_pcm,snd_opl3_lib,snd_timer,snd_hwdep,snd_mpu401_uart,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device
> snd_es18xx             35124  2
> snd_hwdep              10500  1 snd_opl3_lib
> snd_mpu401_uart         9728  1 snd_es18xx
> snd_opl3_lib           12928  1 snd_es18xx
> snd_page_alloc         11400  1 snd_pcm
> snd_pcm                78724  1 snd_es18xx
> snd_rawmidi            25760  1 snd_mpu401_uart
> snd_seq_device          9612  2 snd_opl3_lib,snd_rawmidi
> snd_timer              24836  2 snd_pcm,snd_opl3_lib
> soundcore               8800  1 snd

How about 'strace -eopen alsamixer'. Is there anything alsamixer is 
unable to load? Try as root too, you may be missing a user group. There 
looks to be a bundle of information on the Ubuntu forums about this as 
well so that may be a good read too.

Otherwise, make sure your system is up to date and running the latest 
kernel (not sure what the Hardy roadmap looks like so I am unsure as to 
what the lastest is, just run apt-get install dist-upgrade)