ThinkPad microphone not working

[suvayu ali]

Hi Stan,

Apologies for the delayed follow-up. I got side-tracked with a deadline.

On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 20:59, stan <gryt2 at q.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Apr 2012 18:30:37 +0200
> suvayu ali <fatkasuvayu+linux at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It seems to me some bad settings are being cached somewhere; which
>> would also explain why booting to an older kernel also fails. Do you
>> have any ideas where these might be?
>
> Do you have alsa-utils installed?  There is a program called alsactl in
> that package that allows you to store sound device settings (as root),
> and it says in the man page that it puts them in
> /var/lib/alsa/asound.state.
> So you should be able to delete that file and alsa should then revert
> to a default configuration and be settable.  If it then works, you can
> use alsactl to save the working configuration. I'm not convinced this
> will work, since it doesn't sound like you altered that file from when
> it was working. But maybe something else changed it.
>

I have alsa-utils installed and I found about the state file before I
saw your post. The F15 Live USB doesn't have one so I removed it from
F16 and rebooted but that didn't help.

> amixer is also in that package, lower level than alsamixer, to look at
> all the settings. And you could try running the alsa-info.sh program
> from the alsa web site,
> http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page
> to get a printout in prettier format than amixer.
>
> If the above don't yield a solution to your problem, is it possible to
> check the state file on the F15 live, and somehow get a copy of that
> into your current installed OS?  Or run amixer or alsa-info.sh and look
> at a diff with your current system.

I had a weird crash with amixer at first, but after rebooting it was
gone.

Output from amixer when it crashed:

ALSA lib pulse.c:243:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect:
Connection refused
amixer: Mixer attach default error: Connection refused

Output from amixer on F16 (after the reboot):

Simple mixer control 'Master',0
  Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined penum
  Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Playback 0 - 65536
  Mono:
  Front Left: Playback 30419 [46%] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 30419 [46%] [on]
Simple mixer control 'Capture',0
  Capabilities: cvolume cswitch cswitch-joined penum
  Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Capture 0 - 65536
  Front Left: Capture 65534 [100%] [on]
  Front Right: Capture 65534 [100%] [on]

Output from amixer on F15 Live USB:

Simple mixer control 'Master',0
  Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined penum
  Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Playback 0 - 65536
  Mono:
  Front Left: Playback 30419 [46%] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 30419 [46%] [on]
Simple mixer control 'Capture',0
  Capabilities: cvolume cswitch cswitch-joined penum
  Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Capture 0 - 65536
  Front Left: Capture 65536 [100%] [on]
  Front Right: Capture 65536 [100%] [on]

The only difference is in the last two lines. I'm not sure how to
interpret this difference. Is it important that the non-working setup
has numbers smaller than the Limits line?

The output of alsa-info is a bit large so I have put them on pastebin.

F15 Live USB: <http://pastebin.com/VkA33cD8>
F16: <http://pastebin.com/TZm4XS4d>

Again I do not see any clear troublesome differences.

I did observe something strange though. When I use arecord, pavucontrol
shows me that something is wanting to record. But the meter doesn't
show any signal (as in no fluctuating bar). So maybe its listening to
the wrong device? I think this was one of your original suggestions on
"things to check". I thought I checked that, but maybe I was wrong.
Could you be a more explicit about how I could eliminate this
possibility?

Thanks a lot for your help so far. Appreciate it a lot. :)

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.