Comment 4 for bug 44131

I have a fresh install from about a month ago. Please note we had the same problem in the past with different hardware under breezy; at that time we had desktops, and we simply installed sound cards that supported hardware mixing under linux.

Also note, that the problem is fixed for me now, by following the steps in my above comment. nevertheless, I attach a sample blend file, with a sample sound.

please note you will have to delete and re-add the sound strip (select by right clicking , delete to delete, then shift-A audio-RAM and browse to the wave file). this is because blender soundblocks always use absolute paths to point to a wav file (even if the sequencer strip shows relative paths), so the sound block points to the wave file in my home directory. (Annoying bug in blender)
I don't know if I can attach a file here, so I'll link it from my site..
http://www.freefactory.org/misc/sounds.tar.gz

also note: at least in the case where your sound card supports hardware mixing, blender sound will work, and will not block/be blocked by sound from other applications out of the box. In my case, sound in blender blocks/is blocked by sound from other apps, which is the best I've gotten in blender on this hardware (cheap laptop sound- I believe an intel sound chipset) and any distribution.
sorry for the longwinded comment