Finally fixed my problem. Every time I launched a gnome application from the terminal, I would always see something about esd not being found. So, the little light bulb came on in my head and I installed the esound package. After a quick reboot, magically the sounds works and I have my PCM device
The cause of esd not being installed? Well, I actually installed Kubuntu first to see if I would like the new KDE. I ended up liking Gnome more, so I installed the ubuntu-desktop package. So for whatever reason, esound is not in the list of dependencies for ubuntu-desktop.
Finally fixed my problem. Every time I launched a gnome application from the terminal, I would always see something about esd not being found. So, the little light bulb came on in my head and I installed the esound package. After a quick reboot, magically the sounds works and I have my PCM device
The cause of esd not being installed? Well, I actually installed Kubuntu first to see if I would like the new KDE. I ended up liking Gnome more, so I installed the ubuntu-desktop package. So for whatever reason, esound is not in the list of dependencies for ubuntu-desktop.