I just installed Ubuntu on a new Dell Inspiron, and today the headphone jack has stopped working. It still notices that something has been plugged in and even displays a prompt to route sound to the headphones, but no sound plays from any source. This occurs with any pair of headphones plugged into it, and any headphones plugged in are nonfunctional.
Normally I'd chalk this up to a driver issue, but bizarrely, the headphone jack was fully functional for about five or six hours after installing Ubuntu, and only mysteriously broke after I installed several music applications (beets, qmmp and Audacity) and a couple power management ones (TLP and powertop, but powertop isn't even working so I doubt it's the culprit).
Bluetooth headphones worked last night after the headphone jack broke, but this morning they would connect and then sound would just play through the speakers. I tried fixing it through the audio settings menu, but the headphones weren't even showing up. Upon restart, however, the Bluetooth headphones resumed working as normal, while the jack remained broken. I would assume that the two issues are related.
Anyone have any insight onto what could be causing this?
edit: I fixed it by using something I found on a six-year-old post with a seemingly unrelated problem. Typing the following command into terminal
alsactl restore
caused all problems to go away.
