The solution is/was ridiculously simple. On my system I have to have pulseaudio running, to get any sound. When I had attempted to get pulseaudio started, with pulseaudio --start , an error message was returned. However it turns out that despite the error message, pulseaudio _was_ started. And my sound works splendidly, as I discovered only by chance about five hours later.
I thank the folk who responded to the bug report for their E-mails. Alan -- Alan McConnell : http://globaltap.com/~alan/ A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.(Thomas Browne) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
