The sound chip on the mother board in one of my laptops is fried and I am forced to use USB speakers (or replace the motherboard) and I cannot use alsa because no config file gets written because the system doesn't recognize any sound chip during install.

The following code installs Pulseaudio and got me up and running again.

$ sudo apt-get install padevchooser pavucontrol

P.S. I know this is a weak tuto but it's mostly for my personal reference and I searched the tutorials here and did not find a fix.