Sound stopped working, Dell Laptop

[Peter Flynn]

On 17/06/2020 21:51, P. Echols wrote:
> Greetings all,
> I have a dell inspiron laptop with Ubuntu 18.04.4.  Also dual boots to
> windows 10.
> Everything was working, but suddenly sound does not work.  Volume is
> up, "built in audio" selected in settings (the only choice).
> Following some guides on the interwebs, I reinstalled alsa and
> pulseaudio to no effect.  Oh, and in my efforts, I managed to make the
> toolbar widget go away.  But still should work, right?

I had almost the exact same problem years ago. Turned out some random 
app felt the need to run off the sound when it initialised for the first 
time, and I couldn't work out which one it was, and it had effectively 
disabled sound. I never did get it working again, and as I was going 
through distros to find one I liked, whatever that one was I tossed it.

I'm afraid it's a matter of hunting through everything likely to have 
accessed sound (eg Youtube page in browser).

P