My problems with Hardy are making me despondent and pessimistic. I have a common or garden Mecer PC with an Intel 965 motherboard which came with a dual core 2.13 processor and a 82801H  Audio Controller. Hard to get more common or garden than that. My sound does not work. I have spent many fruitless hours scanning the forums and launchpad and the Internet in general. I have followed all the advice given me except that I have not re-built the whole ALSA suite from source. There have been some advances - alsamixer now works when it didn't before; I can set my default sound card which I couldn't before. But sound there are none. I have learned that the problem was first reported on the Alpha 2 release and is a confirmed bug. Did I mention that it worked fine with 7.10 Gutsy? OK - so perhaps downloading the latest source of the whole alsa suite and re-building is going to solve my problem. On the other hand perhaps it won't. I am very reluctant to go down that route - somehow it seems to confirm every popular prejudice against Linux - that it is for Geeks only. If Ubuntu can't run on my stock standard off-the-shelf Intel PC, how much faith can I have that the next release is even going to support my ethernet card? Good - that is my frustration vented publically and is now off my chest. Advice on what to do next? It seems I can - Revert to Gutsy. Keep on mucking around and re-build alsa and recompile my kernel and learn yoga and stand on my head Learn to live without sound Hope that the bug gets fixed. Suggestions? Oh - thanks for listening to me. And I still love Ubuntu even if a bit less than before. Bill