So if your like me, you’ve been suffering through some painful sound problems in Ubuntu Hardy, apparently its a known kernel issue, so just sit tight. However, if your like me (or 90% of nerds) then you need some sort of music to code. A little digging revealed that I did not in fact have any of the alsa kernel modules installed for my current kernel. apt-get left me high and dry (also without an nvidia driver yet, but that’s an easy fix).
The simple remedy is to just build the alsa modules yourself, a pretty painless task. The problem is, if you want to have any hope of keeping your install halfway clean, then you need to get those files tracked by dpkg so we avoid conflicts when the modules are fixed. There’s a simple solution:
sudo apt-get install module-assistant
sudo m-a update
sudo m-a prepare
sudo m-a a-i alsa
This utilizes the handy module-assistant package to automatically build alsa for you. 
Reboot and enjoy!
