Issues with Skype on Acer netbook
 

Hiya,

I am working my way round the house loading Ubuntu 11.04 on the various PC's.
My son has an Acer Ferrari netbook which I have loaded 11.04 on to dual boot with win 7.
Specs are here: http://www.acer.com/ferrarione/specifications.html

Everything seems to work OK apart from Skype.
As he is disabled and can't get to my office upstairs (where my other webcam enabled PC is) I want to get this working for him so that he can have chats with family/friends.

For my office PC I had issues with Skype but found a fix to load PulseAudio and tweak the mic settings.

This does not work for the Acer netbook. The sound is crackly/distorted and if you switch the video on during the chat then the person you are calling can't hear you. So the video starts but the audio stops

I have loaded the latest ATI graphics drivers btw.

Any help appreciated.

The problem is the sound, not the ATI graphics.

1. Try disabling the option Allow Skype to automatically adjust my mixer levels in Skype's audio preferences.
2. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1672513 be patient and work through the stuff there to get alsa configured right.

Thanks for the advice.
Re point 1 - I had already done that, and changed all the newly installed PulseAudio settings accordingly (i.e unlocked the Right and Left mic settings and set one to zero input).

One thing I had not tried was loading and configuring the gnome-alsamixer app. So thanks for that.

This has got me further on in that audio initially works OK - but I do not have a full solution. Fail mode is as detailed:

• Audio initially works fine during a Skype chat - both ways
• When the person I am Skyping switches their video on - fine. I see them. I can hear them, they can hear me.
• However when I switch my video on - the Video works both ways - but bizarely my mic goes dead and while I can hear them, they can't hear me.
  Also in my skype panel the small pic of my webcam in the bottom left of the panel screws up the graphics to the right of it (just in the skype panel - not the rest of the screen).
  Basically my video causes strange things to happen in my skype panel and effectively switches off the mic. Odd, or what.

Ok,

Check to see if there are any extra messages in dmesg, or the kernel log when you enable the camera.

The other thing to try is a remote mic. PITA? yes. But I'm wondering if there's not some sort of kernel/hardware/pulseaudio feature that causes the onboard mic input to go away when the camera is enabled.