After starting the year with a new fresh installation of Linux Mint 12, almost all the things worked out of the box except one thing. The microphone (mic) was not capturing the sound (absolutely no sound) so that meant that I had to keep my old installation of Mint 10 intact so that when required I could switch over to it and use Skype.
After just over a month I finally got into my debugging shoes today to figure out what the problem was.
My first thought was PulseAudio, I remember having removed it from Linux Mint 10 as well and using Alsa. So based on my gut feeling I went ahead and uninstalled PulseAudio using the command: sudo apt-get autoremove pulseaudio
The next step was to install a mixer to configure Alsa, for which I installed ‘Gnome-ALSA-Mixer’ which provides a front end: sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer
I then restarted my machine and ran gnome-alsamixer using the run option to check all the mixer setting and correct things where required. Then I started Skype and did a test call, Surprise…Surprise… I was able to hear my voice.
Removing PulseAudio helped me use Skype again without having to revert to Mint 10, but there was an added bonus which I had not expected in the form of sound control in ‘TVtime’. For more than a year now I had lost the ability to control the sound levels via TVtime I had to use the volume controls in my speaker to change the volume level which was quite frustrating, but I am really happy now.
Sometimes you get more that you asked for and this was what I experienced when I remove PulseAudio, this also reminded me of the old saying ‘Hitting two birds with a single bullet’.
You may ask why not use Windows, my simplest answer would be doing such things makes you think out of the box for solutions :-)