Hello,
I am using Ubuntu 10.04 on a Lenovo X201 laptop. My microphone wasn't working, so I googled and found found a post recommending me to install various alsa related packages. It was a while back, and I don't remember the exact commands, nor can find the post - sorry for being unhelpful

The upshot was that the microphone worked, but some applications, like google hangout don't work (though Youtube and Facebook videos do), and while playing a file with mplayer I need to specify the -ao alsa flag. When playing files with VLC, I need to go to Tools->Preferences->Audio and explicitly specify Output audio type as 'ALSA Audio Output'.

I didn't have to explicitly specify alsa before anywhere earlier, but now I do. Could anybody tell me what happened, and how I can get rid of the alsa flag and get google handout to work?

Cheers