the case of the disappearing audio - solved

An annoying little problem I ran into the other day:

• After Firefox 3b5 and flash locked up the screen, I had to force power cycle.
• On reboot, the master audio control showed it muted.
• On un-muting, no luck. The audio was completely absent.

Solution:

• I re-installed the alsa driver.

sudo apt-get remove alsa-base
sudo apt-get install alsa-base (it prompted me to insert the 8.04 alternate DVD)