Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.10 hit the shelves (Thursday, April 19th 2007), and it delivers!
Particularly on sound management. A small issue used to plague laptops like the Dell Inspiron 9300. Because these laptops had a built-in subwoofer of sorts (it would play the same tune at a lower, more bassier level), they were controlled separately from the mixer.
What happened if you wanted to make your laptop shut up with a flick of the buttons on the front panel?
You couldn’t! Muting was specifically bound to just Master, and this let the sub (aptly named Master Mono) keep playing. So while fumbling around to turn stuff off in a classroom/library setting, you’d still have the subwoofer going off!
But with Feisty Fawn this goes away!
System -> Preferences -> Sound
Holding down the CTRL key, I selected Master, Master Mono and PCM. Controlling all three at the same time would make sure that sound wouldn’t go back to the pre-stoneage area of laptops, but at the same time, the mute button in the front panel would work.
And it does!
It needs more code 
This is my first experience with Linux, and this issue was bugging the hell out of me. Thanks for the solution! Works great!!!