The only thing missing from the Linux setup in my laptop was games, so I fired up Adept and rectified the situation. After playing a few rounds of Nibbles and Patience, and a bit of surfing, I tried playing some music, and found that there was no sound. This was not a problem with Amarok alone; even XMMS and Kaffeine seemed to be afflicted. The surprising thing was that there were no error messages, either from the UI, the console, or even the system logs.
My only experience with resolving sound issues in Linux is 'killall artsd' and switching between ALSA, OSS, etc., but none of these tricks helped this time. I narrowed things down somewhat by booting from the Kubuntu LiveCD and checking whether the sound worked (it did, so the problem is definitely not hardware-related).
Going to look into this tomorrow.
Update: Problem solved,
sort of. I installed ALSA from the sources and fiddled around with gnome-volume-control, and the sound came back. Only thing is, there is a constant hiss from the speakers and an occasional high-pitched whine. The sound of my keystrokes also are faithfully reproduced by the speakers. Wait a minute, is it because of the mic volume? It is! Turned it down, and I am again able to type in peace.
