Thanks to this thread,
http://www.amilo-forum.de/topic,2939,-amilo-1437g.html
sound and acpi is working like a charm. I have now fully updated my ubuntu hoary installation and everthing I can think of is working as expected. Well, except for the instanton functionality which, if I have understood this correctly, depends on the drive not having logical partitions. Anyway, it's no big deal. I guess I could use geexbox or the like for this anyway.