Vaibhav Vaidya wrote:

> Hi,
>  
> changing over to ESD switched off my sound altogether... soundcard 
> detection tool hung, I had to kill it. My default setting is ALSA, for 
> input and output

What about the other subsustems?

As a note, in my system when I had enabled the "sound server" under GNOME 
(Preferences::Sound), ALSA was not functioning properly, I switched to ESD and sound was 
working again, but the "Sound Recorder" application was hanging.

So I disabled the "sound server" in Preferences::Sound, switched back to ALSA and 
everything works OK.


If this doesn't fix your problem, may be it is a sound card driver thing, perhaps you may 
check the manufacturer web site, they may provide a driver for linux.