As Colin Guthrie writes in his blog, his work on Phonon now adds support for PulseAudio in KDE's trunk branch. The code should then land with the end-user in KDE 4.4.

A couple of patches Guthrie included in the release to initiate the changes in the distributions have since become redundant. A new PulseAudio version 0.9.21 was issued to address the patches.

The new PulseAudio version provides a few bugfixes but also integrates Guthrie's device-manager module. A recent article in Web Upd8 encourages upgrading PulseAudio to 0.9.21 in Ubuntu 9.10 from a Launchpad repository (PPA). At the same time it suggests doing so only when experiencing audio problems. The version is still experimental and a repository is available for Ubuntu 9.10 only.

The recommendation for adding the repository and upgrading to PulseAudio 0.9.21 is to use two commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-audio-dev/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade