[ubuntu-studio-users] Upgrade to 17.10 audio problem : no detectable sound card in xfce

[Achilleas Mantzios]

Hello list! My son uses and likes Ubuntu Studio for audio/video/gaming. I am an old Unix die-hard using unix since early SunOS, and also FreeBSD/Linux since the early 90s.
Ok, enough with the intros, here is the steps that lead to the problem :
At first I tried to upgrade from 16.10 but obviously there was no update path due to 16.10 being obsolete. Then I tried a hack to force upgrade directly to artful , by changing /etc/apt/sources.list 
but this resulted in an unstable system (no grub, ultra slow USB wireless mouse and keyboard, etc). And finally decided to bite the bullet, back everything up and go for a fresh installation. In the 
process of installation I decided to keep old user data files (i.e. not format).
Files were kept, but not the exact users -> uid , groups -> gid mappings. So I had to do some editing there.
Everything seemed to go semi-OK, but then started some more problems. Mouse/Keaybord were still slow, laggy even lossy (keyboard). I changed the USB port and keyboard and mouse started behaving good.
Then I decided to test some sound. I am not currently on the box, but i supposed the tool I used was : xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin . This detected no audio card. Just a dummy card.

Can you guys shed some light on what to do next?

-- 
Achilleas Mantzios
IT DEV Lead
IT DEPT
Dynacom Tankers Mgmt