Michael Harper’s Tech & Art Blog

I’ve tried to do this multiple times with Ubuntu yet never suceeded for some reason. I purchased a full Skype package the other day and I’ve been stuck on Vista as I could never get the audio to work on Ubuntu. I tried a few new distros the other day after the ATI incident with Ubuntu 9.04. Ubuntu Studio 8.04 and Linux Mint 6. Ubuntu Studio 8.04 failed due to a few random issues such as the Linux headers error. I was unable to compile the madwifi modules against the kernel and I dropped it. I grew tired of this wifi issue and decided to move on. I read many reviews about Linux Mint - an unofficial variant of Ubuntu that has a few additional packages and supposedly wifi readiness. My wifi didn’t work off the bat but at least I was able to compile it easily. I use Linux Mint because it is Ubuntu made easy - essentially. The latest version is based off of Ubuntu 8.10. They are working on the Linux Mint 7 version that is based on 9.04.

Skype is available for Windows up until version 4 where as it is only released under version 2 for Linux. Version 2 works fine for me so I decided to give it a go. The issue I was having was apparently a PulseAudio error. Skype would tell me there was a problem with the capture device and would cancel calls. From what I read, PulseAudio is responsible the sound mixing in a lot of Linux distros. I had to follow this tutorial in order to get Skype to where it would work. After following the steps in that tutorial, I had to adjust my Skype input device and output devices. For Sound In, I selected “HDA ATI SB (hw:SB,4)” and for Sound Out I selected “pulse”. The main step that helped me out was the terminal command:

alsamixer -Dhw

I believe I could have skipped the rest of the tutorial and just edited my mic levels and default capture device here and been done. I will get to try this again shortly with my desktop.

Once in alsamixer, hit TAB to move from Playback view to Capture view and and change your Input Source (I actually have two sources) to something like Mic or Front Mic. I chose Front Mic for both sources to always allow for my external mic to be the source. I pumped up the Front Mic level to 100 and turned Mic Boost & both Capture fields down to 0. On my Satellite A215, I would have to change the Input Souces to Mic in alsamixer and then change Skype’s Sound In devcie to “HDA ATI SB (hw:SB,0)” if I wanted to use just my internal microphone.

Your Sound In choices will vary according to your machine. I have an ATI chipset so all of my choices reflect ATI in some way. You get the idea. I hope it works for you.