prelims

First make sure that you have a working pulseaudio system for your user, if you have any issues check :
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578 The kde counterpart to the gnome sound applet is in the kde system settings pannel (kmenu, computer, system settings, sound). If you want to manually bring up the gnome applet (dont know how much of an effect it will have if you don't use gnome), in a terminal window run "gnome-sound-properties"

Then make sure it works for you on a user level by running pulseaudio -D, in a terminal, and then running the Pulse audio Device Chooser. If you ran the device chooser program before the terminal command close out the applet by the clock and re-run it from the kde menu.

getting the server running system wide at startup

note: this is not considered a secure setup, so make sure this machine isn't accessible from the internet (have a firewall that blocks everything to the machine but ssh).

Go into the /etc/default/pulseaudio file and change the following line:
PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START=0 (change the 0 to a 1)
DISALLOW_MODULE_LOADING=1 (change the 1 to a 0)
edit /etc/groups and put your username in the following group names:
pulse, pulse-access, pulse-rt

then test it out by killing any exisitng pulseaudio demons (if any were running at userlevel use a killall commanand). Then run /etc/init.d/pulseaudio start as root.