Comment 10 for bug 89552

From herd5 to Beta, the situation improved dramatically. Thank you very much. Now all sound hardware is supported on this type of laptop (at least all I know of :-) - speakers, headphones, built-in and pluggable-in microphones).

Few screenshots of "Volume Control" application to which I will refer:
  * default state: http://www.flickr.com/photos/76746644@N00/440091621/
  * "ideal" state: http://www.flickr.com/photos/76746644@N00/440091627/

The only remaining issue is that user must do a lot of clicks to get reasonable sound configuration from the default one. E.g. plubbable-in microphone is not shown, however some unused device is shown. I will refer to items by names how they appear in "Volume Control" application. Let me describe the steps one needs to make to get to a nice all-working configuration after boot of Ubuntu Feisty Beta:

  1. Add "Capture" and "Input Source"
  2. Remove "Line In"
  3. Add "Microphone"
  4. Mute "Front Mic"
  5. Raise level of both "Front Mic" and "Microphone" from zero to a reasonable value (100% for "Front Mic", since it's very silent)
  6. Add "Front Mic Boost"
  7. Raise "Front Mic Boost" to a reasonable level (50% - 70%)
  8. Finally on "Recording" tab, raise "Capture" to 100%

Following these steps, I reached a very decent configuration (see "ideal" state image link above) with no back-track (or how do you call the effect when microphone input is played to speakers close to the microphone and it starts to "whistle"), with reasonable volumes for microphones. Or said differently, it's prepared for an out-of-the-box experience. (I was just switching from "Front Mic" to "Mic" and back in "Options" and recording with "arecord -tcd -d2 test.wav" from different microphones)

Rationale for the procedure above is:
  * the microphone that can be plugged in by user with a jack is mapped to "Microphone", but "Microphone" is hidden by default and "Line-in" is shown (see "default state")
  * the built-in microphone is mapped to "Front mic" (which is shown by default), but it is unmuted, so any sound spoken to it is sent to speakers when one sets its volume high (but even on the highest volume of this microphone, the recording power is weak so no strange sound effects usual to this configuration appear)
  * the "Capture" is not shown by default, and set to 0 after enabling it, so the user can't record out-of-the-box
  * the "Input source" is not shown by default, so the user can't out-of-the-box select the capturing source (built-in or plugged-in microphone). I don't know if this is an issue because maybe it's settable in each sound application, but I am no expert in this.

Thanks for fixes in Beta and I would be glad if you took my further suggestions into account.

All the best,
Boris Dušek