Daniel Nouri's Blog

Big thanks to Daniel T. Chen a.k.a crimsun on #alsa (freenode) who helped me get audio capture (recording) working on the Sony Vaio VGN-FE31M on Ubuntu Edgy.

Edgy comes with ALSA 1.0.12. What you need to do is get ALSA 1.0.13 driver sources and compile them:

$ wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/driver/alsa-driver-1.0.13.tar.bz2
$ tar xjvf alsa-driver-1.0.13.tar.bz2
$ cd alsa-driver-1.0.13
$ ./configure --with-cards=hda-intel,usb-audio --with-oss=yes \
  --with-sequencer=yes --with-kernel=/lib/modules/`uname -r`/build \
  --with-debug=full
$ make && sudo make install-modules && sudo depmod -e

Now reboot and have sound recording working!

For turning on and off the internal mic you must run alsamixer, then in the catpure view select Line and hit space. The letters CAPTUR should appear in red above the word Line. If you want to activate the internal microphone, select Mic and hit the space bar. (Thanks to gnubien for explaining this!)