Pulseaudio brings up some great improvements and is already chipped by Fedora 8.

Getting it to work on my Debian Testing was very easy :

$ aptitude install pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat pulseaudio-module-gconf pulseaudio-module-hal pulseaudio-module-jack pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-module-zeroconf pulseaudio-utils libasound2-plugins

However there were two issues to face : no more sound with Flash and Skype.

To solve the flash issue, you have to download and set up this package (more information or sources on this page).

Concerning the Skype problem, you have to create – or edit if existing – an /etc/asound.conf file as follows :

pcm.card0 {
type hw
card 0
}

pcm.dmixer {
type dmix
ipc_key 1025
slave {
pcm "hw:0,0"
period_time 0
period_size 2048
buffer_size 32768
rate 48000
}
bindings {
0 0
1 1
}
}

pcm.skype {
type asym

playback.pcm "dmixer"
capture.pcm "card0"
}

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "skype"
}

Then, restart alsa-utils :

$ /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart

Finally, just select “skype” as sound device in the Skype preferences and it should work. I hope it will help !