On the other side of cloud

Tags:KDE linux multimedia thinkpad

I supposed that my T40’s built-in microphone was ruined(for this is a second-hand thinkpad). But accidentally, I found it works well…
And here are some tips for laptop’s built-in microphone on KDE(KMix):
1. You can test if you microphone works by click the green point below the mic icon(Input tab) to make it light and connect the input of microphone to speaker, then flap your Mic. But be careful, if you use built-in speaker, the treble voice would be generated if you adjust the volume to more than level 3. So, in the normal use, please close the microphone output to speaker(except you use headphone).
2. You can enhanced the microphone output. Click Switches tab in KMix, and select Mic Boost +20dE. But don’t make microphone connect to built-in speaker with this.
3. If you still not content with the result, you can set the Capture of Input tab to maximum.
4. You can also use vumeter -r to see the recode volume level.

I got very perfect result with disable Mic to output, using Mic Boost and using built-in speaker.
Good luck!

Tags:acpi linux thinkpad

It’s should be simple to get special key of thinkpad like Fn-F3 work on debian, and if you don’t know, you can see here.

I am using ibm-acpi, and everything goes well, except Fn+F3. I found there is a bug on debian package result in Fn+F3(close lcd) failed. The /etc/acpi/screenblank.sh which was called by ibm-acpi called getXuser from /usr/share/acpi-support/powerfunc, and this script assumed that you boot with gdm/kdm/xdm, so it using something like:

user=`finger| grep -m1 “:$displaynum “ | awk ‘{print $1}’`

to find your current user name. But if you boot from init 2 as me, that’s failed. Finger won’t show “:0″ or some other thing on your line, so getXuser will fail.

I fix this issue with add these lines in getXuser function:

if [ x“$user” = x“” ]; then
user=`finger| grep -m1 “*tty” | awk ‘{print $1}’`
fi

Though it not very precise, it works.