the alsa drivers were moved into the kernel for 2.6. However they are
still developed separately. There are therefore two ways to get alsa sound
card drivers onto your system: use the drivers in the kernel, or use the
alsa-drivers package. The latter uses the separately developed drivers
(which are sometimes a little more advanced, stuff seems to get in there
before the kernel).
If *your* kernel has the alsa sound drivers compiled in, or as modules,
then installing alsa-drivers *will* break your sound.
Now I don't have an installed ubuntu system here at home, but I do have a
ubuntu x86 live cd. It has sound going (in vmware no less!) and definitely
uses a driver from the kernel, not from alsa-drivers. alsa-drivers is not
even installed. Based on that I believe that installing alsa-drivers would
be a mistake on an installed ubuntu system, unless you recompile the
kernel to get rid of the kernel based drivers. Therefore when MAtthew says
he has kernel2.6.10-5-386, alsa driver 1.0.9b I am suspicious that he has
installed alsa-driver and mucked up the whole sound thing.
So Matthew let us know what you have done :-)
Two packages were already installed with ubuntu - alsa-base (alsa driver
configuration files) and alsa-utils. As I couldn't get a sound out of
the machine (trying to open volume control told me "No volume control
elements and/or devices found.") I embarked on a journey to get it
working and yep had a go at installing the latest alsa drivers. Sounds
like this may have been a mistake then?! :-(
