Fixed! eeePC 1000 No Sound Settings (microphone)

[JohnSB]

Background:
I seldom used the EeePC 1000 I bought a few years ago because the original system software seemed limited and annoying. After lots of hassle I managed to upgrade it to Ubuntu, but though it was great for Skype after a while Ubuntu got increasingly annoying too (incessant updates that took hours). Now that I've switched to Linux Mint the machine is finally useful, and would still be great for Skype in particular.

Problem 1:
No audio! Nor are there any Sound settings in the Preferences menu. That is, I click the little "gear" icon at the left end of the bar atop the desktop screen, select Preferences, and there's -nothing- named Sound, Audio, Speaker, Microphone, or anything even slightly related to the setting I'm looking for. After lots of unsuccessfully trying every suggestion online including in this forum, I noticed that there's a little "speaker" icon toward the right end of that same bar atop the desktop screen. I clicked that and then the checkbox next to the "Mute" box and the speaker magically started working, and there's even a volume control. Turns out my EeePC 1000 also has a speaker mute toggle switch using the Fn-F10 key combination, but it only works to turn sound OFF but it won't toggle it back on again in Mint Linux. Therefore I'm learning to never use the keyboard for controlling the speaker. Now I can hear people in Skype.

Problem 2:
No Microphone!! This one really took some time to fix, but the good news is it will be easy for you because you've found this forum post. Turns out the sound system on this little notebook computer and many like it is using something called PulseAudio. All you need to do is install the volume control app for it. To do that:

A. Make sure your computer is online. Click the gear icon at the top-left of the screen and select "Software Manager" from the menu. When it opens, type "PulseAudio Volume Control" (without the quotes) into the Search box at the upper-right of the app. When the app by that name is found, click the "Install" button. It doesn't take very long to automatically download and install because it's a small app.

B. After you think it's installed, click the gear icon again and select "Sound & Video" where "PulseAudio Volume Control" will show up part way down the list. Of course, you're going to click that now to launch it.

C. To get my mic working, all I had to do is select the "Input Devices" tab and click the little speaker icon with a red "X" next to it. Click it a few times (it toggles on and off), and move your mouse away from it each time to see how the icon changes to indicate whether it's on or off (the volume sliders below it also change to gray when the mic is off). So you can also control volume, and pretty much everything else you want to mess with in Sound settings on your computer with this cool little app.

Now I can use Skype on this handy portable Mint machine! I'm so happy to have fixed this that I'm sharing my success in the hope that lots of people who've been having audio hassles will find a happy ending. It would also be nice if some future version of Mint could determine that a particular computer would benefit from having the PulseAudio Volume Control installed, do it automatically, and add it to the Preferences as Sound where most people would look for it.