Backports allowed me to intermittently access my 3810T's internal microphone (very inconsistently) but when it was working, it was unusable soft. In skype, if the microphone was working at all, the only thing loud enough to record was my finger scratching around the mic hole. However, I noticed that it seemed quite loud in gstreamer-properties 'Test.' (Unfortunately, skype 2.1 uses pulse, so I figured I could either go back to version 2.0 (this cause skype to crash intermittently). Fortunately, there is a workaround, to trick apps like Skype into falling back to Alsa, which works for me:
Backports allowed me to intermittently access my 3810T's internal microphone (very inconsistently) but when it was working, it was unusable soft. In skype, if the microphone was working at all, the only thing loud enough to record was my finger scratching around the mic hole. However, I noticed that it seemed quite loud in gstreamer- properties 'Test.' (Unfortunately, skype 2.1 uses pulse, so I figured I could either go back to version 2.0 (this cause skype to crash intermittently). Fortunately, there is a workaround, to trick apps like Skype into falling back to Alsa, which works for me:
$ cat /usr/share/ applications/ skype.desktop | grep Exec SERVER= 127.0.0. 1 /usr/bin/skype"
Exec=/bin/sh -c "PULSE_
found here: http:// share.skype. com/sites/ linux/2009/ 09/some_ explanations. html#comment- 155521
Now the real question: is the microphone haphazardly working (and ultra-soft if so) a bug in ALSA or pulseaudio?