After few times of upgrade and downgrade of distribution lately, the system lost sound. Reinstallation of pulseaudio package didn’t work out. What would I do? Instead troublshooting pulseaudio, I decided to use ALSA. I barely any help from the official Debian Wiki nowadays. How many users can understand Debian Wiki’s ALSA (https://wiki.debian.org/ALSA) guide?
Source: http://linuxg.net/how-to-properly-replace-pulseaudio-with-alsa-on-crunchbag-linux-and-debian-squeeze
$ sudo killall pulseaudio
Remove all pulseaudio packages:
$ sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio libpulse-browse0 paman pavumeter pavucontrol
$ sudo mv /etc/asound.conf /etc/asound.conf.bak
Delete the pulseaudio directories from the user’s home:
$ rm ~/.pulse-cookie $ rm -r ~/.pulse
Install ALSA packages
$ sudo apt-get install alsa-base alsa-tools alsa-tools-gui alsa-utils alsa-oss alsamixergui libalsaplayer0
Check the sound by running multimedia player such as vlc. Playing flash video on Google Chrome had no sound. I followed the instruction here (http://dallarosa.tumblr.com/post/19626256742/fixing-no-sound-in-browser-problem-on-linux) to fix it.