Dell Latitude D820 - Mic weirdness with Skype

[psych-major]

Getting Skype to work with Linux laptops has a few known issue, most noteably, needing to set the sound system to full duplex.

I had done that, but still had no mic capabilities. I opened Audacity and verified that it was the mic itself, not Skype.

I stumbled on the fix accidentally: I had to open alsamixer in a console and toggle the Input Source between Mic and Line and back to Mic again, then hit escape to save the setting. Kmix and Gnome's volume control did not work, only alsamixer...I believe this is an issue with the sound card firmware, as there are some weird options that it is capable of under Windows, like switching the line-in port between Mic and Line. I don't think alsa supports these options, and therefore I need to toggle the setting to have the equivelant of selecting the appropriate source from the pop-up I get in Windows.

So now I knew the fix, but having to do it manually each time I boot is unacceptable, so...

In addition to alsamixer, alsa provides a cli interface called amixer. All that is needed to toggle the Mic and Line values at start-up is to add a couple of amixer commands to /etc/rc.local. or the equivelant start-up script for your distro. Here is what I added to mine in Ubuntu:
/usr/bin/amixer set "Input Source" Line
/usr/bin/amixer set "Input Source" Mic
*Note - The above is case-sensitive!
That's it, I now have a live mic at login and Skype is happy!

[XiaoKJ]

Well, I'm going to be slightly off-topic here, but Skype is a company which disregards standards. Please support SIP and use them instead.

Good skype replacements include Gizmophone, google talk...

If you really need skype connectivity, you may look at Jajah and frown upon their contradicting statements (Allows you to use SIP, but disallows you to use anything other than jajah phone system)

But again, your mic system is really wierd! Maybe its because the system requires a manual reinitialisation of the input source.

[psych-major]

I agree with Skype's non-conforming, but the larger picture is switching my family from Windwos to Linux, and as much as possible I'm getting them used to apps with direct correlation in Linux. For example, Firefox, Thunderbird, Audacity and Skype.

What's ticking me off about Skype currently is that they are not supporting Linux as robustly as they at first promised, specifically with webcam capability, anyway...

I do in fact have a weird sound card, in Windows, the onboard mic works normally, and the jack input let's me toggle between mic or line. It's this functionality that I think alsa is confused by, and like I mentioned, I think forcing it is having the same end result.