I installed Debian the other day. So far it is working really well for me. I discovered one minor annoyance today that took me a few minutes to figure out and fix.

Right-clicking the volume control icon in the Notification Area brings up a context menu. The first entry is "Mute", the second is "Open Volume Control".

When I tried clicking on the second one, I kept getting an error message "Can't open gnome-volume-control no such file". I...

There had been a weird problem with sound on Arch. Whenever there was a flash item being displayed (or perhaps flash using sound, I suppose), there would be no sound elsewhere. And if there were sound elsewhere, whenever you play something on flash, it would conversely be mute.

The fix is quite simple:

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If you have multiple sound cards, installing pulse volume manager is almost a must (IMHO).

1. Set the default sound cards from the pulse volume manager

2. From the 'Playback' tab, you should be able to 'shift' the sound stream to the appropriate sound card that you want when you're playing something in that application e.g. playing a youtube video in Firefox...

At some point, while using my softphone, my voice was hardly perceptible on the other side. People would hang on me because they could hear only whispers. I could not leave messages because the answering service could not record anything. Very frustrating considering that it was working great before.
Maybe I messed with some configs as I usually do.
I tested the input through my microphone with KRec; it was all as if I my microphone was dying.
I played with the settings on Kmix...