[ltp] Loosing alsa, under Debian, on ThinkPad T61...

nescivi linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:04:20 -0400


On Tuesday 02 June 2009 06:41:47 Petar Milin wrote:
> Hello ALL!
> Hope my Subject is palatal to grasp the problem. Simply: I lost Internal
> Mic and I cannot use Skype, which I need very much.
> If I do: purge all alsa related files (gstreamer0.10-alsa, alsa-base,
> alsa-tools, linux-sound-base), reboot; then install them again;
> everything is happy and internal mic is working. However, either if I
> start Skype or reboot, or whatever, alsa crashes -- internal mic is
> dead, although I can hear sound.
> Please, help me with this! I really need Skype...
>
> To repeat: I use Debian testing on my ThinkPad T61.

I found that the mixer (kmix) wasn't showing all the settings for the card, 
which I managed to reset with the menu item Configure channels.. from the 
Settings menu.

Maybe a similar problem on your side?

I also had a problem for a while that I seemed to have to have the internal 
mic volume up (or the mic boost) (so actually hearing it through my headphones 
as well) in order for skype to work.
But again, I'm not sure whether this was an oversight of some other switch 
that I didn't try to get it to work differently, or something going wrong 
between the alsa subsystem and skype...

BTW, how do you find out that "alsa crashes"? it seems more that the internal 
mic is not working with skype, rather than a whole kernel module crashing...

sincerely,
Marije