I was trying to get sound working on an EEE PC in Pidgin, and had to do a bit of googling before I found it… here’s the solution (taken from the EEEuser forums)

  1. Press Ctrl+P to go to Preferences
  2. Then select Sounds tab
  3. In the sound method section, select “Command”
  4. Type “aplay -q %s” (without the quotes) as the command.