Internal microphone workaround

I found a workaround for the internal microphone. The problem is that the current driver sees the microphone as a stereo device, so you have to make it mono. After the workaround it's usable but it has a lot of background noise.

1. Install pulseaudio volume control

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

2.  Open it

Applications -> Sound & Video -> PulseAudio volume control 

3. Goto tab  'Input Devices' and select 'Hardware Input Devices' from the Show control at the bottom.

4. Unlock the stereo channels by clicking on on lock icon

5. Adjust one channel to zero and the other to 90% to 100%


Skype


1. Install Skype

2. Go to Skype's Options -> Sound Devices and uncheck 'Allow Skype to automatically adjust mixer levels'

3. Hit apply and make a test call

Latest compat-wireless works again

As reader Cliff Wells mentioned in his comment to the article Fixing wireless my solution works again with the current compat-wireless bleeding edge sources compat-wireless-2010-04-12 and the lucid kernel 2.6.32-21.

Fixing wireless

Next big obstacle to overcome is the wireless driver. After some research I learned about three paths to follow:

1. Waiting for lucid final
2. Using the windows driver via ndiswrapper
3. Compiling a ath9k driver from compat-wireless

Option one is not really an option as I want to have wireles now. The ndiswrapper solution might work well but I guess not as efficient as a native driver. The missing native driver support was already mentioned in a launchpad bug entry. So my first shot is compiling the driver by myself. Hey, it's linux and the source is with you. Actually it was quite easy. I got all information from http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download

Get the current source tarball:
wget http://wireless.kernel.org/download/compat-wireless-2.6/compat-wireless-2.6.tar.bz2

Unpack it somewhere in your home dir:

tar xvfj compat-wireless-2.6.tar.bz2

Change into the source dir, for example:
cd compat-wireless-*

Select the ath9k driver and compile it:

./scripts/driver-select ath9k

make

Install the driver:
sudo make install

Unload the old drivers and load the new one:

sudo make unload

sudo make wlunload

sudo make btunload

sudo modprobe ath9k

That's it. The only drawback is that you always have to do that again after installing a new kernel image.

Note: kernel 2.6.32-22 and compat-wireless-2010-05-05 works.

Fixing brightness controls

The brightness controls via Fn+F5 and Fn+F6 doesn't work properly. It's more like unpredictably cycling through various levels instead of going from brighter to darker or vice versa. The issue has already been reported:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/512567

I added "acpi_osi=Linux" to the kernel options and it worked for me. Although dimming when idle doesn't work and the on screen notification doesn't work either.

So I added the also "acpi_backlight=vendor" to the kernel options and now everything works. Auto dimming and notification, too.

1. sudo gedit /etc/default/grub
2. find the line starting with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
3. add "acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor" to the options
4. sudo update-grub2
5. reboot