I have a Dell inspiron 15 3542 and i could never get HDMI working properly and a few days ago I finally got it working after installing intel drivers. All was working fine until today my tv wouldn't produce any sound and HDMI wasn't an option under sound settings. I found a thread with somewhat similar issues and while trying to deal with my impatient family I ran the commands that were suggested before seeing the small comment under it stating it caused even more problems. The commands I ran can be found at the bottom of here: HDMI is not displayed in the "Sound" settings on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
The only one i didn't do was sudo apt-get dist-upgrade because I wanted to stay on 14.04LTS and wasn't sure what that command would put me on. Now I still don't have HDMI audio out but now I also don't have half of my system settings. appearance, sound, etc...
How can I fix this without losing my data? I am relatively new to linux and I could really use some help! I'm now forced to boot windows for working HDMI audio...
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
won't take you to the next version (14.10), please feel free to upgrade it to get some essential updates.