This time i'm going to talk about something that bugged me for quite some time. Since i got my new shiny ThinkPad T61 and installed a fresh Debian unstable (or sidux, but who cares, really?!) on it, i never got to make the internal microphone to work. This is especially bugging, since lately i'm "forced" to use skype a lot, and skype is not much fun if your communocation partner can't hear you while you hear him loud and clear. Since shouting at the two little microphone holes on the T61 palm rest didn't help either, i decided to take a deeper look into it. At first i was trying to fiddle around in the skype settings, because my naivity let me think that it has to be the fault of the evil closed-source software. Despite skype neing crappy in a lot of ways, this particular problem was not caused by skype.
The T61 has an Intel ICH8 HD Audio device, which is suported by alsa's snd-hda-intel module. So maybe other notebooks with the same sound device might have the same problem. Googling around for a bit i found out that some T60 users report the same problem. So it was either a driver problem or some misconfiguration from me.
