Okay, so I just had a panic moment, I booted my machine back up (long story why it was down, I may write that up after), and had no sound. I'm at a total loss here, it was working fine before rebooting. Note, this is the first reboot since having converted from Ubuntu to Debian. I look at the modules, everything seems fine, but I'm getting a snd_ctrl_open error which I have no clue what is, but looks like a kernel module error to me. So I poke around loading extra modules, no luck. I start googling, and one guy asks about the output of alsamixer. Now, I have an alsamixergui, but no alsamixer; what's up with that? Its very weird, that's what it is, Linux always comes with a command line client before a graphical one. So just for kicks, I install alsa-utils, and guess what? it's pulling alsa-base and several other packages I'd have sworn I'd had. Apparently in the conversion from Ubuntu to Debian, they were uninstalled. So a second reboot later (that being the easiest way to make sure the modules and alsabase and everything are all in sync that I know of, though I'm sure the reboot wasn't necessary), I again have sound. :-)
