OpenSuse 11.2 on Sony Vaio NS25G: Internal Microphone HOW-TO

On my fresh OpenSuse 11.2 setup, the VAIO inbuilt speakers worked well, but the internal mic did not seem to capture. KRecord and Skype did not pick the microphone inputs. Much tinkering and several days later…

My initial suspect of pulse-audio being broken was wrong. The following fix worked:

Dig into the Sound card hardware:

lspci | grep Audio

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller

This Intel-compatible audio controller would use the snd-hda-intel driver. Let’s find out:

From the Yast Control Center pick Hardware > Sound. In the screenshot below, the last line indicates the snd-hda-intel driver. Hit Edit and set the model option to toshiba-s06. Hit Next/Ok all the way thru.

You can verify your settings out here:

sudo vi -R /etc/modprobe.d/50-sound.conf
options snd-hda-intel model=toshiba-s06

Use the alsamixer to make sure your speaker and capture volumes are cranked up.

alsamixer

The references below helped. The Ubuntu forums link below has references to other model names that might work for other laptop models.

[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HdaIntelSoundHowto
[2] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=314383