Ok. I've installed Mint. It seems the same workaround in Mandriva and Ubuntu 7.10 that I've discovered also applies.
In short, boot into Mint, press Fn-F1 to suspend the notebook, and then press anything to resume the notebook. Sound will then just works. Maybe need to unmute it. This will also enable wireless after you press Fn-F5 since it doesn't work too I've put this in
http://blog.syafril.com/?p=38 after discovering it in Mandriva 2008.1 and then testing it in Ubuntu 7.10.
Does anyone know what script is run when resume from suspend? Maybe the same script can be used at boot time to enable the sound, wireless, and bluetooth. It's a problem with the ACPI driver used for this notebook model - the sound is there but it's hardware-muted until something runs in the resume script and enables it. I'm still new with Linux (on and off) and I won't know where to start looking...
Sadly, this doesn't work in openSUSE 10.3 as it has some other script to handle Fn-F1 and suspend just fails.