ugh headphone jack

I have an HP DV2000 series laptop and I tried to use the headphone jack just now (never had to in the past) and it doesn't work. The sound still comes out the the regular speakers and nothing comes out of the headphone jack.

I heard some stuff about ALSA, but I don't know what that means, I looked at Synaptic and I have "alsa-base" version 1.0.11-5ubuntu1 installed.

What can I do to get it working? I don't know what sound chipset I have, but I do have the nVidia/Intel Core 2 chipset on my computer, if that helps. Thanks for any help

Anyone have any tips?

What desktop environment are you using (KDE/GNOME/Xfce/etc)? There is an option in alsa to enable headphone jack sensing so it's possible it's not enabled. You can try turning this on in gnome-sound-properties or kmix.

I'm using Xfce. I'll look for that option.