On Mon July 2 2018 03:31:56 Gene Heskett wrote:
> Yes, I can hear system noises before I login. Login and they become muted
> and firefox is silent, until I stop whatever FF is playing and issue the
> alsoctl restore command, which reports a can't do that, system is busy,
> but when I restart FF playing whatever, it then works till the next
> reboot.

System sounds before login may be happening without ALSA so at the
moment I'm not sure whether ALSA is working before login.

You could try speaker-test (ALSA white noise generator) to see if
ALSA is working before login (or aplay if you have something playable).

Let's check that ALSA is set to start automatically.  Do you have

  ls -l /etc/*.d/S*alsa*

You should have a link called something like /etc/rcS.d/S16alsa-utils
to /etc/init.d/alsa-utils.

--Mike