Solve ALSA audio and mic issues on Lenovo
Thinkpads on Debian and Ubuntu Linux
Since I've blogged about my recent skype issues. I've played a lot
with
pulseaudio, alsa, alsa-oss to experimented a lot until
I figured out why Skype was failing to properly delivery sound and
record via my embedded laptop mic.
Anyways, while researching on the cause of my
Thinkpad r61 mic
issues, I've red a bunch of blog posts by people experiencing
microphone oddities with Lenovo Thinkpads
Throughout the search I come across one very good article, which
explained that in many cases the Thinkpad sound problems are caused
by the snd-hda-intel alsa kernel module. snd-hda-intel fails
to automatically set proper sb model type argument during Linux
install when the soundcard is initialized with some argument like
options snd-hda-intel model=auto
Hence, the suggested fix which should resolve this on many Thinkpad
notebooks is up to passing the right module argument:
To fix its neceessery to edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
.
debian:~# vim
/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
Find the line in the file starting with:
options snd-hda-intel model=
and substitute with:
options snd-hda-intel model=thinkpad
Finally a restart of Advaned Linux Sound Architecture (alsa) is
required:
debian:~# /etc/init.d/alsa restart
...
At most cases just restarting the alsa via its init script is not
enough, since the ssnd-hda-intel kernel module is already in
use by some program or something, so its best to do a reboot to
make sure the module is loaded with the neew model=thinkpad
argument.
My exact laptop exact sound card model is:
debian:~# lspci |grep -i audio
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD
Audio Controller (rev 03)
After changing the module and using alsamixer and aumix to make
sure mic is unmuted and its volume is high enough, mic sound rec
works fine.