I was playing with a gateway laptop with the 15.4 at Best Buy and ultimately 
did not purchase it beacuse of these same issues...

the audio is likely the Intel High Definition which is causing all kinds of 
problems in the linux world.

Try doing

modprobe snd-hda-intel stack=3
or stack=6, or model=gateway, or model=intel

Might help with the sound. I bought theHP Pavilion dv6755us instead and 
everything flat out works out of the box. I went to Fry's and they let me run 
Kubuntu on a bunch of their laptops till I found one I liked.

I really like this laptop now.

Nathan

Try these links...
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HdaIntelSoundHowto

You will likely have to rebuild alsa... or wait for it to update.

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