Introducing Project Cookbook series

Hello everybody,

I have a feeling that sometimes I am running in circles and face the same issues repeatedly. What pisses me off is the fact that it takes a lot of time and thinking how to tackle a certain situation over and over again as well. That drives me absolutely crazy -- when we all were in a certain problem-solving event 1 year ago, this time it should take 50 % less time to solve it based on the previous experience, right? Right, but that's not happening. Without blaming anyone I found myself running in circles and trying to invent the solution that has been kind off FORGOTEN over time; probably due to workload or too wide focus on various issues flying around at the same moment.

I will write a small Project Cookbook -- mainly for my personal purposes and hopefully with a decent smile on my lips while doing so.

As for usual meal recipes you will ideally need quality ingredients and not forget anything from the full list otherwise the result might not be as tasty as you would expect :)

My recipes: 

One tough product decision appetizer

Overwhelmed soup by too many ingredients (preparing)

Main course from release blockers backlog (preparing)

Baked project triangle served with one vertex fixed (preparing)

Well done QE steak with customer satisfaction dipping sauce (preparing)

Internal microphone ThinkPad T520 does not work with Fedora 16

Hi, 

This is my personal, very short and simple guide how I have set my internal microphone working on ThinkPad T520 and Fedora 3.3.0-4.fc16.x86_64.   

Switch to root and open config file /var/lib/alsa/asound.state See differences in control points 6 to 12 below. 

Generally – values have to be set as true or higher than 0 etc. After editing and saving run this command: sudo alsactl restore (and check if it works)  

Note! My Fedora implicitly deletes this changes after boot. It can be useful copy that fixed version of asound.state and simply rewrite it and restore again. 

More sophisticated method – set up cron job for this. 
  

Note2! Some people experienced problems with restoring modified asound.state file. In that case simply create new file with correct settings and load it using --file in alsactl because it points on /var/lib/alsa/asound.state file by default.

My control.6 to control.12 changes in asound.state file:

control.6 {
        iface MIXER
        name 'Mic Boost Volume'
        value.0 4
        value.1 4
        comment {
            access 'read write'
            type INTEGER
            count 2
            range '0 - 4'
            dbmin 0
            dbmax 4000
            dbvalue.0 4000
            dbvalue.1 4000
        }
    }
    control.7 {
        iface MIXER
        name 'Mic Capture Volume'
        value.0 80
        value.1 80
        comment {
            access 'read write'
            type INTEGER
            count 2
            range '0 - 80'
            dbmin -7400
            dbmax 600
            dbvalue.0 600
            dbvalue.1 600
        }
    }
    control.8 {
        iface MIXER
        name 'Mic Capture Switch'
        value.0 true
        value.1 true
        comment {
            access 'read write'
            type BOOLEAN
            count 2
        }
    }
    control.9 {
        iface MIXER
        name 'Internal Mic Boost Volume'
        value.0 2
        value.1 2
        comment {
            access 'read write'
            type INTEGER
            count 2
            range '0 - 4'
            dbmin 0
            dbmax 4800
            dbvalue.0 4800
            dbvalue.1 4800
        }
    }
    control.10 {
        iface MIXER
        name 'Internal Mic Capture Volume'
        value.0 80
        value.1 80
        comment {
            access 'read write'
            type INTEGER
            count 2
            range '0 - 80'
            dbmin -7400
            dbmax 600
            dbvalue.0 600
            dbvalue.1 600
        }
    }
    control.11 {
        iface MIXER
        name 'Internal Mic Capture Switch'
        value.0 true
        value.1 true
        comment {
            access 'read write'
            type BOOLEAN
            count 2
        }
    }
    control.12 {
        iface MIXER
        name 'Master Playback Volume'
        value 74
        comment {
            access 'read write'
            type INTEGER
            count 1
            range '0 - 74'
            dbmin -7400
            dbmax 0
            dbvalue.0 0
        }
    }