My initial suspect of pulse-audio being broken was wrong. The following fix worked:

Dig into the Sound card hardware:

lspci | grep Audio

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller

This Intel-compatible audio controller would use the snd-hda-intel driver. Let’s find out:

From the Yast Control Center pick Hardware > Sound. In the screenshot below, the last line indicates the snd-hda-intel driver. Hit Edit and set the model option to toshiba-s06. Hit Next/Ok all the way thru.

You can verify your settings out here:

sudo vi -R /etc/modprobe.d/50-sound.conf
options snd-hda-intel model=toshiba-s06

Use the alsamixer to make sure your speaker and capture volumes are cranked up.

alsamixer

The references below helped. The Ubuntu forums link below has references to other model names that might work for other laptop models.

[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HdaIntelSoundHowto
[2] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=314383

OpenSuse:
cat /etc/SuSE-release
cat /etc/issue

Debian and it’s variants:
cat /etc/debian_version

RedHat:
cat/etc/redhat-release

Slackware:
cat /etc/slackware-version

And this one too:
dmesg | head -1

Annoyance 1:
The laptop brightness controls did not adjust the brightness on KDE 4 running on OpenSuse 11.2. (They worked on Ubuntu Jaunty earlier). Neither could I find brightness sliders anywhere in KDE panels. This helped:

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$ xbacklight -set 70

The value range is from 0 thru 100. Oddly, the laptop’s brightness shortcuts are BIOS controlled, so I wonder why they are dependent on the OS.

Annoyance 2:
A Ctrl+Bksp (Control + Backspace) on the Firefox address bar erased the entire address. I’m accustomed to using Ctrl + Bksp to erase segments of the URLs (“/” separated). The fix was in the Firefox “about:config”

• Firefox Address bar: “about:config”
• Filter by “layout”. Edit this item “layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation”
• Change that to a true

I’ve tried this on a Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) with Apache2. Here is what we are trying to setup:

• Subdomain for your web project: http://mysubdomain.mydomain.com (say, http://staging.mykillerapp.com)
  

• You wish to give restricted access to a people in your team, to deploy the project. You don’t wish to give them sudo or admin rights to your Linux box.

Creating a Sub-domain

Your hosting provider is likely to give you a web-based domain management tool (CPanel or something else). Add a DNS “A record” as follows:

subdomain      PUBLICIPADDRESS      A

For example:

staging      x.x.x.x      A

Create a non-root user account to manage your application

$ adduser staging

I’m assuming that staging home is the usual /home/staging. Lets create a www under it, which will serve as the root directory for our virtual host /home/staging/www/

Enable the Apache Virtual Host Module

sudo a2enmod vhost_alias

Create a virtual host configuration for Apache2

Apache2 tracks the virtual hosts configurations in this location: /etc/apache2/sites-available/. There will be a default config file; Lets make a copy of that file at the same directory location.

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$ cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
$ cp default staging
$ vi staging

Make your virtual host file look like this:

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<VirtualHost *:80>
 
        ServerName staging.mykillerapp.com
        ServerAdmin appadmin@mykillerapp.com
        DocumentRoot /home/staging/www/
 
        <Directory />
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride All
        </Directory>
 
        <Directory /home/staging/www/>
                Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
        </Directory>
 
        ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
 
        # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, 
        # warn, error, crit, alert, emerg.
        LogLevel warn
 
        CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
 
</VirtualHost>

Enable your virtual host

$ sudo a2ensite staging

This sets up a soft-link in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ which points to your virtual host config file.

Finally, restart apache

$ sudo service apache2 restart

Hit your virtual host at http://staging.mykillerapp.com