Sound

Getting sound to work has always been a pain on Linux. Not Macintosh, what with its standardized hardware and drivers written especially for it. I got sound to work like this:

Install ALSA.

Ensure you are a super-user and type:

aptitude install alsa-base

Answer "Y". This gives you ALSA, the set of drivers and utilities for making sound. Guess what? Often times, it doesn't work as-is. You may need to initialize it.

Initializing ALSA

Type:

alsactl init

Initializing resets the sound mixer to mid-range defaults for the system.
To take a look at this, type:

alsamixer

ALSA Mixer

Press Esc to exit the mixer.

Now test the speaker, again as a super-user:

speaker-test

Speaker test

which should make some noise. Press Control-Break to exit the test.