OK, I thought I might post some info about the problems I have been having with recording from the internal microphone on my Acer Aspire One netbook with Studio 1337. I have finally worked out what was going wrong with my recording settings. (At this stage I am just doing basic recording with Audacity and mhwaveEdit without using Jack).

Initially I could not get the microphone to record, but after various efforts at fiddling around with the mixer settings it would start recording ok (but I wasn't sure why...). Now I realise that I was using Alsamixer incorrectly. When I first boot into Studio 1337 it does not have the "capture" function selected within the mixer settings. I opened Alsamixer and found the "capture" slider and discovered it was at a minimum, so I boosted it to the max. This didnt help. So then I set "Mic boost" to the max as well. Still no joy. Then I fiddled with the Retrovol mixer settings and found a checkbox next to the capture slider and saw that it was not ticked. Sure enough when I tick this box the mic becomes active.

So why did Alsamixer not have this checkbox?? It turns out that Alsmixer DOES have the same function, but in order to access it you have to arrow across to the capture function and then use the SPACEBAR to turn the capture function on (you will see the text highlight in red when it is activated). Probably everyone else knows this already but anyway I thought I would mention it in case there are others who are as new to this media stuff as I am :-)

alsamixer shows you by default the playback controls. You need to press F-something (I think F3 or F4) to get to capture controls. There you need to select the proper source.

Thanks SegFault. Seems to be F4 to go straight to "capture" controls. I had been using the tab key, which also gets you there.
My biggest problem was that I was not using the space bar to toggle the capture function on.

No matter how high I had the volume it was inactive till I placed the cursor under the capture slider and hit the spacebar.