Microphone not working in IBM T43

[Guest]

Hi folks,
I'm new to this forum and hope to find a solution for a little problem.

I'm running KUBUNTU 10.04 on an IBM/LENOVO Thinkpad T43.
It's running well so far. Yesterday I have installed SKYPE and tried a conference and found out that the Microphone is not working.
I tried following:

• checked if MIC is not muted -> Volume was full power and not marked with red cross
• used Headset with Micro instead of internal Mike -> conference partner couldn't hear me anyway
• started voice recorder instead of SKYPE -> nothing was recorded

A standard Audio-Driver is installed, from my opinion correctly, because output via Speaker and Headset is good.

Now I'm intending to buy a webcam C270 HD Webcam from Logitech, there is an interesting offer in amazon with headset, which I'd like to buy. Logitech Support Page announced "no support" under LINUX.
In the meantime I found some articles in WWW, that some HD-Devices from Logitech are working "out of the box" with SKYPE. Is there a different driver automatically detected by KUBUNTU for these Devices?

Kind regards

Rainer

[dibl]

Re: Microphone not working in IBM T43

I don't know your Lenovo hardware, but the general advice goes like this:

Install alsa-base, alsa-utils, alsamixergui, padevchooser, paman, pavucontrol

Open alsamixer (terminal) or alsamixergui and put the window where you can see it.

Open pavucontrol, use the "Configuration" tab to confirm that both your onboard chip and your headset (or webcam, as applicable) are available. Use "Input Devices" tab to mute the device that you don't want to use. The "set as fallback" button is significant for Skype operation. On at least one of my systems, my webcam will serve as a Skype microphone if I not only mute the internal mic, but also set the webcam as "fallback" device. The Skype test call is a pretty reliable test of your settings.

To record from a "line in" source plugged into your sound card, you might need to use the "rear mic" and "rear mic boost" channels in alsamixer. Observe the alsamixer channels while you are working with pavucontrol, because sometimes you learn which channel is active when the volume slider moves in concert with the pavucontrol volume slider. I use audacity for recording -- it can be very picky. You might need to close all other packages that have the capability to use the sound system, including the browser. On one of my systems, I always have to run the "normalize" effect on the recorded file because it won't let me boost the level enough during the actual recording. YMMV.

Most newer Logitech webcams work out of the box. I have an old QuickCam Communicate STX that works fine. I know someone with one of the newer "HD" cameras - I'm not sure it's the C270. I'll check with him about it and report back.

Finally, my experience with USB headsets and webcams is that after you "sleep" your computer, you have scrambled the USB channels and you can lose the audio connection, and it won't come back until your reboot the system. (One of the gurus may know of a way to reset the USB bus without a reboot -- I'd love to hear it).

EDIT: The C270 appears to be fully supported with the Linux UVC driver (video): http://www.ideasonboard.org/uvc/

The microphone in the C270 will be supported with the snd_usb_audio driver.

To launch Skype with your webcam, you may need to "preload" it. First install the v4l package. Here is my "skypelauncher.sh" script:

#!/bin/sh
export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype
exit 0