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By default, PulseAudio in Ubuntu up to Jaunty is set to work with 2 speakers (front channels).

Here is how to enable more than 2 speakers (channels) in Ubuntu - PulseAudio:

1. Edit the PulseAudio daemon.conf file by pressing Alt + F2 and enter:
gksu gedit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf
And search for: default-sample-channels. Remove ";" from the begining of the line, and instead of "= 2", change it to the number of speakers your system has. For instance if you have a 5.1 system, the number should be 6, for a 7.1 system: 8 and so on.
This is how that line used to look before you made any changes:
; default-sample-channels = 2
And this is how it's supposed to look after:
default-sample-channels = 6

2. Now you can save the changes and either restart your computer or:
killall pulseaudio && pulseaudio

3. Check to see if the channels are muted. Open a terminal and type
alsamixer
alsamixer

4. You can now test the channels by typing this in a terminal:
speaker-test -c 6
Again, replace the number with your number of speakers.