Sound disappeared after unstable upgrade

[Alan Chandler <alan@chandlerfamily.org.uk>]

I upgraded my sid system with the latest set of packages.

I have now lost by sound, but I am not sure why.



When I run alsamixer as root I see a device that appears to be the sound 
chip on my motherboard, and using aplay to send a .wav file works.

If I run as me - a user, alsamixer shows a "pulseaudio" card as the only 
card.  Playing the wave file does nothing.

I presume I have a pulseaudio problem, but I don't know what to do about it.

If I look at the sound settings in the Gnome System Settings, it says be 
sound output is a "dummy card".  I don't know whether that just implies 
its going via pulse-audio, or that pulse audio has not found a real 
device and is using a dummy one.

NOTE: the same upgrade seemed to screw up udevd - I get an error message 
about failing to queue file, and I have to unplug and replug my usb 
mouse and keyboard to make them work.



--
Alan Chandler
http://www.chandlerfamily.org.uk