Renes Tipps
Asus A6VA under linux
Soundcard
The soundcard is based on the ALC880 chip which is supported by the kernel module snd-hda-intel . This module is part of the alsa infrastructure. Unfortunately there are a couple of possible ways to internally connect the chip with the audio ports and the driver can not guess the way its done. On my laptop the result was that i did not get any sound out of the headphone port. To select the correct mapping the module got the additional parameter model. For my A6VA i needed to assigned the value z71v to this parameter to get the headphone port working.
The following modules configuration would do the job.
options snd-hda-intel model=z71v
It highly depends on your distribution where to permanently store this configuration. On my debian system i created a file called /etc/modprobe.d/1-local which just contains the line above. If you use /etc/modprobe.d/sound you risk the setting to be overridden by some script.
Some more details for the snd-hda-intel module and its module parameter can be found at this intel hda linux howto.
This howto is especially useful if you have another type of laptop with the same kind of problem.
I used a fairly recent kernel (2.6.15) to get it working. It maybe works in earlier version but there was a lot of work done to the snd-hda-intel driver in the last releases of the kernel.