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Well rock on! So my laptop had two minor driver related glitches that I'd hopped would be fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. But I'm also damn impatient. So I've been bumming around the web a bit looking for a solution every now and again.
One of those problems was that the headphone port was deathly quiet with anything plugged into it, and also it acted independently of the speakers so you had to manually turn them off once a headphone was plugged in. Testing under Vista, the headphones at least turned off the speakers but were pretty much just as quiet, maybe a smidgen louder. Still not really usable in any kind of noisy environment.
Well, I was reading through one of the bug reports about this on Launchpad (there seems to be a couple all roughly about the same thing), Ubuntu's made at home version of Bugzilla. The sound card my laptop comes with is an Intel HDA card and the module is snd-hda-intel. Seems that when Gutsy first shipped sound worked not at all, but there was a backport of the module from a newer kernel. I went to check, but I already had that installed. However lower down was the gem I needed.
echo "options snd-hda-intel model=acer" >> /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
For reference, I have an Acer laptop so you might get better mileage out of your Intel HDA sound card suggesting your laptop's model, but this did the trick for me. I finally get loud volume out of the headphone jack, so the slightest background noise doesn't overpower it, and as a "bonus" plugging headphones in turns off the speakers. Better than Vista now.
