So… long story short, I messed up my headphone jack on my notebook which where I use Ubuntu Karmic Koala Alpha x (6 I think) as my primary OS. Luckily though, I found an old sony external sound card lying around the office at work. One of the artifcats that had been left behind by one of the developers of yester-year.

I thought great! I’ll plug my headphone into the exteral sound card and I can again block the world out with sound the next time things get rowdy in the development room.

Everything worked great! Sound was channelled nicely out through the external sound card out of the box via pulseaudio. All except flash (flashplugin-nonfree) which has been hardwired to use my internal sound card. I don’t know what the particulars are, and what causes this, but I found that completely disabling the internal sound card was the solution.

» Read more: Ubuntu Linux: Forcing sound out through your external USB Sound Card