I already had installed alsa-base and alsa-utils, but not alsa-tools; so
I installed alsa-tools and alsa-tool-gui; aptitude also installed one
lib file. I then ran as root alsaconf which did its thing, including
detecting the builtin sound card, and told me to enjoy.
Unfortunately the results were the same as reported previously. I tried
to listen to an audio CD -- a commercial one, not a CD burned with MP3
on it -- using in succession noatun, juk and kaffeine -- no response.
I checked to see whether the CD was mounted; it was. Directory
/media/hdc listed the tracks on the CD.
As for the newscast, the same result as before as well -- the KDE crash
handler.
The laptop, by the way, is a Toshiba Tecra 8000 with a P2 CPU. When it
still had Windows 2000 on it I was able to do both -- listen to audio
CDs and watch and listen to downloaded newscasts. So it would seem that
the problem(s) is(are) not hardware related.
Any further suggestions?