Possibly this is a pulseaudio issue - one solution is to use ALSA instead of pulseaudio.
This will loose the sound indicator together with the pulseaudio tools. To change your sound use alsamixergui
or gnome-alsamixer
sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get install alsa-base alsa-tools alsa-tools-gui alsa-utils linux-sound-base alsamixergui gnome-alsamixer
Then reboot.
To reinstate pulseaudio:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop indicator-sound
As we have discussed, it is worth checking if this is a specific problem in 11.10 that could have been resolved in the upcoming 12.04 release. To do this, download either the Alpha 1 release of 12.04 or the daily-build.
Use Unetbootin to write the ISO to a USB stick and boot from that into the 12.04 live USB.
On confirmation that this is a specific 11.10 issue, then the problem is likely to be a kernel specific issue.
You have four choices:
- Stick with what you have and wait until 12.04 is officially released in April
- Upgrade to the 12.04 Alpha - only do this is you are prepared for breakages. Only do this if you are happy and experienced enough to overcome alpha quality issues such as non booting, graphical issues etc.
- Install 12.04 as a dual boot with 11.10 or as a virtualbox guest install in 11.10
- Upgrade the 11.10 kernel to the 12.04 kernel.
If you want to try the 12.04 kernel then first the important proviso:
drive-image backup you current 11.10 install
I'm not kidding - upgrading the kernel is not to be trivialised and can leave you in a non-booting scenario. Use a good quality drive-image software such as clonezilla.
Step 1 - temporarily change your sources to precise:
sudo sed -i -e 's/oneiric/precise/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
Step 2 - download and install the precise kernel
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-generic linux-headers-generic
Step 3 - change your sources back to oneiric:
sudo sed -i -e 's/precise/oneiric/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
Then reboot.
Once logged in test that you have successfully booted into the kernel 3.2 by running:
uname -a