[ale] sound disappeared (debian)

[Jay Loden]

I have had repeated problems on my debian laptop.  I had no sound (wrong 
permissions, which I corrected).  I got it working for about a month, only 
for it to randomly disappear yesterday upon rebooting. 

When trying to configure the sound in Control Panel (KDE) I get the following 
error: 

Sound server informational message:
Error while initializing the sound driver:
device /dev/dsp can't be opened (No such device)
The sound server will continue, using the null output device 

I checked and /dev/dsp does exist, it's a symlink to /dev/dsp0

I'm sorta stuck on this one, because I'm not sure what's wrong.   I ran 
alsaconf again to try and get it to re-recognize the sound card, and it did, 
and it said it was ready to play sound,etc.  But then I tried to open 
alsamixer, and I get: 

alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device

Anyone have some suggestions I can try? 

-Jay