Sorry to hear about the audio. It works just fine in Linux. You might have just "got a bad one", as they say.
You might double check chapter 5 of the manual(page 69) to insure you did indeed plug in the speakers correctly. I have just 2 plain old Logitech speakers and had to plug them into the lower left(gray) plug instead of the normal green one. The green on had sound, but it was real scratchy sounding.
I also figured out the hard way, that if you hook up the front panel audio wrong, it will disable all onboard audio. The stupid leads on my case were wrong, and it took forever to figure out.