For completeness here's what I have ended up with: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf :
alias /dev/mixer snd-mixer-oss alias /dev/dsp snd-pcm-oss alias /dev/midi snd-seq-oss options snd cards_limit=4 slots=snd-hda-intel,snd-hda-intel,snd-usb-audio alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel alias sound-slot-0 snd-hda-intel options snd-card-0 enable=1 model=6stack-dig now as it turns out that sandwich of a sound system we're expected to run currently has more than one weak point. So I have learned that ALSA was only part of my problem, and I got it working just fine with the above config, now pulseaudio and phonon were two other areas where I didn't expect to struggle but I did! In the end, after spending some hours reading bulks of documents on ALSA, pulseaudio and phonon and noticing that in KDE-4.3.5 my control panel was showing not the stuff that documentation for abovementioned pieces suggests, I killed pulseaudio daemon, then restarted it back from command line and... lo-and-behold I've got "PulseAudio Sound Server" in the list of available output devices. Here's what I've done: in my home directory $ cat .kde4/Autostart/pulseaudio.sh #!/bin/sh /usr/bin/pulseaudio --kill /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start -D now things are "singing" again. Doesn't look like I'm getting both ALSA and PulseAudio, but that's OK - so far it seems like PulseAudio picks the right sinks/sources. I am not exactly sure why do I need to kill pulseaudio and restart it again - but it works. Anybody with a better insight please correct me.
