installing from remote sources?

[kareila]

Please pardon the newbie question, but I must be missing something obvious!

I tried out my first Ubuntu install a couple of days ago; all my previous UNIX experience has been with LinuxPPC, which used RPM, and NetBSD, which used the BSD package management system.

My understanding of apt-get was that you could type "sudo apt-get install <package>" and it would go out, find the most recent version of the package from its list of sources, and install it for you along with any dependencies (like what CPAN does with Perl modules). But every time I try it, I get some sort of error about the package being missing or obsolete. (The package I was trying to install was emacs, which I'm confident is neither.)

I know it's doing something right, though, because when I type 'emacs' at a prompt it tells me I can use apt-get to install it, instead of just saying command not found.

Is my apt-get syntax correct? Do I need to configure a list of valid sources? Or am I doomed to manually download .deb files and install them manually, same as with .rpm?

Ubuntu 9.10 has no audio

[wyntarvox]

Last weekend I set up dual-boot Windows XP and Ubuntu 9.10 on my desktop. Everything went fine and I'm really liking Ubuntu so far. (A few years ago I dual-booted a desktop with Windows XP and Debian also, so I'm not completely new to this process.)

However, the only problem I'm having is that I have no audio in Ubuntu. It works fine in XP, both before I installed Ubuntu and now when I boot to XP with both installed. I had a look around Google and found a few people with similar problems, but none of the suggestions seemed to help.

I have two sound cards, one built-in and one additional. I originally bought the additional because I could never get the built-in card to work in XP. I had the built-in card disabled in the BIOS, and Ubuntu (with aplay -l) was only showing the additional card, as expected. I enabled the built-in card and Ubuntu picked it up, but setting the audio to use that card still had no effect.

The additional card is a Creative EV1938 (so it's fairly old).

I've run alsamixer for both cards and made sure all of the settings are at 100% but still no love.

Anyone have any suggestions?