New to Linux // and the forum!

[kveldulv]

Hello all,
I recently decided to get rid of my much hated Vista and go to Ubuntu 10.10. I wasn't able to get dual boot to work, so I just got rid of Vista altogether. I had used Ubuntu 8.04 about 2 years ago and I liked it, and afterwards I kept telling myself to get rid of Vista and go to Ubuntu permanently. I finally got around to doing that.

So far, it's fairly user-friendly, but I do have one problem that it seems that I can't fix: my microphone. Upon installation, everything worked great: my built-in webcam, built in mic, my printer and the like. I was able to use my microphone for about a week, then it just stopped working. I then decided to plug in an external mic in the jack on the front of my laptop, that worked for about a day, then that too stopped working.

As for my laptop, I am running Ubuntu 10.10 on an HP Pavilion dv3. I have ALSA mixer, QAmix, and Kmix installed. When I run Kmix, for example, I don't see anything regarding my microphone *neither built-in nor line-in*. I see only 4 tabs: "playback devices" with 2 sliders: one for "RS780 Azalia Controller Digital Stereo (HDMI)" and "Internal Analog Stereo", "Capture Devices" with a slider for "Internal Analog Stereo", "Playback Streams" which is empty, and "Capture streams" which is also empty. I was under the impression after looking around on the internet and other forums that there would be some kind of option to enable the microphone or a slider of some sort. I don't see or have any of that. As with my sound prefs, it looks like my mic is not muted.

As I said before, I am really new to linux and I am not really sure how to get my microphone working. I am sure you get this question a lot, so I apologize for any redundancy, but I have tried many internet "solutions" and nothing seems to be working thus far. I'm taking a foreign language course, so my mic is really crucial. I am so sorry for the lengthy post, but I just don't know what to do. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.