Alsa and external microphone not working

[Joakim_W]

I plugged in my microphone to the microphone jack on my laptop and alsa don't seem to react to it? I tried many different input sources at the alsa mixer and tried to search this forum for an answer. Someone recommended to install pavucontrol and then execute the command in terminal. I tried that but get an error saying

Connection failed: Connection refused

Also tried alsamixer and alsamixergui. In alsamixergui I can only change volume on sound output and internal microphone. But the internal microphone has a really low sound even if it says it's on max. When I used Ubuntu 10.10 my microphone reacted when it was plugged in and I could easily chose between internal or external microphone. Understand Ubuntu use Pulse, so maybe remove Alsa and use Pulse is a better choise for my laptop?

[Kendall]

pavucontrol (Pulse Audio Volume Control) should have brought all of Pulse Audio when you installed it. Check your package list again the default package list in Ubuntu 10.10 and you should see if anything is missing.

[Jaime Frontero]

Hmmm...

The same thing happened to me, after the Feb. 18th updates. But I'm on LMDE 64-bit. I purged PulseAudio entirely, a month ago - with no problems at all, until this morning when I started up.

Is this a cross-distro issue? Anybody know?

I'm going to remove ALSA, and re-install.

*Sigh*. Sound has always been the Achilles Heel of Linux...