Hi there!
I have Kubuntu 8.10 installed in my computer for testing purposes - I installed KDE 4.2 beta 2 after reading about its improvements. I had already tried Beta 1 by trying KDE Four Live CD but it was unusable - now, though, 4.2 is MUCH better. I completely fell in love with it despite some bugs involving Kopete, theme management and some things about Firefox that I hope will be fixed in upcoming releases ^^

But the one thing that I see as very problematic is Phonon. In the world of linux sound, which already is a mess, I don't quite understand where does Phonon fit and how does it relate to Pulseaudio. All I know is they don't play well together.

My laptop has some problem with its speakers (the hardware this time, nothing to do with drivers) and now it seems not even the headphones are working so I'm using USB speakers. Whenever I open Amarok 2 (whether it's on Ubuntu/Gnome or this Kubuntu) phonon tells me the USB speakers don't work and that it's falling back to default. It works on Kubuntu even though it says it don't, but still I'd like to use PulseAudio Volume Control as I use in Gnome cause I think it is easier to manage the streams (and I'm going to get the pc speakers fixed soon... hopefully...) - but PulseAudio manager in Kubuntu doesn't connect. That is the message, it failed to connect. Also, after I installed PA manager Kmix had some strange behavior - it would open but the window would show nothing at all within.

So I first ask, is there any configuration I need to do to get the two working together? Is it a phonon problem being worked upon? If it's not (and will not be) being worked upon, why not?

I have had an extremely bad experience with Pulseaudio in general, so I disabled it.

Phonon is just a generic API that provides the ability to just play a sound or video, without having to know the underlying system. It will use what ever it is configured with, playing the file through the Backend, which sends it to the audio device.

You will probably have the best experience with the Xine backend, which if you install the Xine pulseaudio plugin will use pulseaudio.

Yeah, I´ll try disabling it in Kubuntu and using pure Phonon to see what happens =) Thanks!