Have a new Lenovo Thinkpad SL510 that I have installed Opensuse 11.3 on to.
Everything seems to be working pretty well except for a problem with the inbuilt microphone.
Got some good information from this site about some settings with alsamixer
I should first explain that alsamixer recognizes the microphone as “mic” and not “inbuilt mic”
The problem I have is that after booting, if I record something all I get is white noise in the recording (using arecord)
If I load alsamixer and change to “inbuilt mic” and then straight back to “mic” and record something there is no problem.
Although I have entered the command “alsactl store” the problem returns on reboot.
On my SL510 with 11.3: alsamixer and KMix shows the microphone selections (under channel “Input Source”) as “Mic” and “Front Mic”. It’s the same on my main and test 11.3 systems, although test has 2.6.36.2-3 kernel-desktop and KDE 4.5.4.
Then I notice you are running 32bit 11.3 on a 64bit notebook. Any special reason? I have 64bit 11.3 installed. Also, you are running default kernel, whereas I have kernel-desktop. I didn’t pick that up in the other thread we are involved in. Other than those differences, my info is similar to yours above. Also:
>arecord -l
**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC269 Analog [ALC269 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Haven’t managed to record anything yet, but still working on that…
I hadn’t actually considered that it was a 64 bit computer as it came preinstalled with a 32bit version of windows.
Are there any advantages to 64bit suse over the 32bit version.
I don’t really want to go through the install process again but might look at 64bit Suse 11.4 when released in a couple of months.
As per the mic issue - over a two day period of changing nothing it appears to have resolved itself. Not sure why. Will keep an eye on it and see if sticks.
Incidentally - what works for you? “Mic” or “Front Mic”
For me - alsamixer shows the choice of “mic” & “inbuilt mic” while Kmix shows “mic” & “front mic” - this difference also seems a bit strange.
Since your mic works, I recommend you open your mixer and do a screen print of the settings. Save that. That will then be your baseline record of functional mic settings.
If sometime in the future it does not work, open up the saved screen print and compare settings. It might help solve a future problem. That works for my wife.
So did mine. There are quite a few long threads discussing pros and cons of 64bit v. 32bit, worth a search when you have the time. On this size of m/c I think 64bit is probably a good idea particularly if you do a lot of video work, and I think there are increasingly more openSUSE 64bit users to discover and help fix issues. However I understand your reluctance to change now, considering you have a couple of things working I don’t (e.g. suspend to RAM, and the builtin mic).
You may have missed this question in the other thread. What BIOS release level do you have? I think you can check it via the initial ThinkPad screen via a key press (sorry can’t recall without looking).
Incidentally - what works for you? “Mic” or “Front Mic”
When I tried to record with Audacity, Front Mic was the only one to register on the level meters, but I don’t know what noise it was picking up.
For me - alsamixer shows the choice of “mic” & “inbuilt mic” while Kmix shows “mic” & “front mic” - this difference also seems a bit strange.
Yes, maybe difference is in 32bit v. 64bit distros, or does it pick names up from BIOS data? “inbuilt” seems a better description to me.
Yes, same here. Just got it working with “Front Mic” using arecord. It gives a nice clean recording, picking up a radio a couple of metres away in the background.
hmmm . . .intersting. This raises another possible prob.
ON boot - to enter bios you are supposed to hit the blue thinkvantagae button. Pressing that does nothing for me and grub comes up.
but that would be another thread again.
Anyway . . .booted into Win7 and got bios version via thinkvantage
# dmidecode
# dmidecode 2.10
SMBIOS 2.5 present.
44 structures occupying 1523 bytes.
Table at 0x000E0010.
Handle 0x0000, DMI type 0, 24 bytes
BIOS Information
Vendor: LENOVO
Version: 6JET83WW (1.41 )
Release Date: 09/21/2010
Address: 0xE45F0
Runtime Size: 113168 bytes
ROM Size: 2048 kB
Characteristics:
PCI is supported
PNP is supported
BIOS is upgradeable
BIOS shadowing is allowed
ESCD support is available
Boot from CD is supported
ACPI is supported
USB legacy is supported
BIOS boot specification is supported
Targeted content distribution is supported
BIOS Revision: 1.65
Firmware Revision: 1.37
Also @farcusnz, thanks for yours, so here is mine and it is older, as expected:
# dmidecode
# dmidecode 2.10
SMBIOS 2.5 present.
44 structures occupying 1523 bytes.
Table at 0x000E0010.
Handle 0x0000, DMI type 0, 24 bytes
BIOS Information
Vendor: LENOVO
Version: 6JET58WW (1.16 )
Release Date: 09/17/2009
Address: 0xE4670
Runtime Size: 113040 bytes
ROM Size: 2048 kB
Characteristics:
PCI is supported
PNP is supported
BIOS is upgradeable
BIOS shadowing is allowed
ESCD support is available
Boot from CD is supported
ACPI is supported
USB legacy is supported
BIOS boot specification is supported
Targeted content distribution is supported
BIOS Revision: 1.22
Firmware Revision: 1.8
Don’t normally like to update the BIOS unless a fix is indicated. Now I am uncertain wrt Suspend to Ram, since I learnt our 11.3’s are different wrt architecture and kernel type. :\
BTW, internal mic worked OOTB on my Gnome partition. alsamixer targets pulseaudio as device, and you only get an input and an output channel, with input choice of Microphone 1/2 (1 is the internal).
I’ve now completed testing my SL510’s internal Mic on three systems running 11.3 with 64bit kernel-desktop. Note the following changes to Input Source, particularly with the newer kernel:
Standard system: 2.6.34.7-0.7 with KDE 4.4.4: select Input Source “Mic” (not “Front Mic”)
Standard system: 2.6.34.7-0.7 with Gnome: select Input Source “Microphone 1” (not “Microphone 2”).
Testing system: 2.6.36.2-3 with KDE 4.5.4: select Input Source Front “Mic” (not “Mic”). Here, the chip/mixer/codec is now detected as “Intel Cantiga HDMI”, whereas previously it’s detected as “Intel G45 DEVCTG”.
For clarification, Gnome’s “Microphone 1/2” is used in Sound Preferences. The alsa-info script reports those Input Source devices as “Mic”/“FrontMic”, as for KDE. The input Mic device selection for KDE/Gnome is equivalent, given the same kernel.
I’m back to my mic not working ‘sometimes’ on boot. Have added input source to kmix options now so can just change to front mic and back to mic and works again.
not sure what would be causing this behaviour but seems very random as sometimes no problem on boot at all.
When I booted my standard 11.3, checked mixer settings (ok with no changes) and used arecord, the resulting test.wav was silent (checked with both mplayer and audacity). Switching from “Mic” to “Front Mic” and back, appeared to fix the problem and a good recording resulted, using audacity. I haven’t seen this problem with the newer kernel (“Intel Cantiga HDMI” support - see above).
With kernel-desktop 2.6.34.7-0.7, /var/log/boot.msg contains the line:
That shows the reversed Mic alternatives (in blue text). There are some differences in other ALSA messages, but I don’t know how relevant these are. Between the two kernels, there are significant differences with thinkpad_acpi messages. However I will post those in that other thread we were using, as it is more relevant.
If I can repeat your problem again, I will confirm that here.
I suspect being random makes it more difficult to get fixed.
This reads like there could be a bug in the alsa driver designed for this hardware. You could consider writig a bug report to have this looked at by the SuSE-GmbH sound packager (who is also an alsa developer). Bug report would need be written on openSUSE-11.3 component “sound”.
Indeed, I am considering the bug report with some reservation. Perhaps you could advise after considering the info below.
Firstly to confirm the random nature of @farcusnz’s problem, and my seeing the same problem exactly as he describes, and the workaround. After booting my standard 11.3 KDE system today, the internal Mic (as “Mic”) worked perfectly. However, the problem immediately showed after booting my standard 11.3 Gnome system, “Microphone 1” was dead. Switching to “Microphone 2” and back cleared the problem. Again booting my 11.3 KDE system with newer kernel today, worked properly.
For me that points the finger clearly at the standard 11.3 kernel/modules e.g. the alsa driver. However, please consider the following short clips from running alsa-info which I combined for comparison (differences in blue):
Note that thinkpad_acpi fails to load with standard kernel-desktop, /var/log/boot.msg reveals:
<3> 16.498777] thinkpad_acpi: Not yet supported ThinkPad detected!
My concern is that alsa developer(s) can do little without a thinkpad_acpi module and correct kernel support (i.e. “Intel Cantiga HDMI”, not as current “Intel G45 DEVCTG”). Would you expect the the newer thinkpad_acpi to be backported to the earlier kernel?
I do not know enough to provide a technical troubleshooting suggestion.
What I do know is the alsa developer’s worked with the user who created the alsa-info.sh script (who used to frequent IRC chat #alsa) to modify the alsa-info.sh script to provide them all sorts of useful information on a PCs hardware and software sound configuration.
So I recommend write a bug report on openSUSE component “sound”, describe the problem, and attach to the bug report the appropriate /tmp/alsa-info.sh output(s) of running the diagnostic script:
