microphone doesn't do stereo on asus 1001p

The mic on my asus eee 1001p doesn't work correctly under Linux (apparently also on a number of models of the eee). In pulseaudio, it shows up as a stereo mic but the two channels cancel each other out so if you want it to work, you have to adjust one of the channels down to 0 (I use the pulseaudio volume control for this, pavucontrol). However, it's annoying that this doesn't just work. I've looked for solutions since I bought the device and I finally found one this week.

The correct solution is a kernel patch which appears to be on its way to kernel land. But while I'm waiting, I found a suitable workaround using the hda-verb utility. Here's the magic incantation below. Update the /dev/snd/* path to whatever is right for your system and then take the "value" output of the 2nd command and do a bit-wise or of 0x80 (in my case, 0x1800 became 0x1880) and use that as the last argument to the last command below.

# ./hda-verb /dev/snd/hwC0D0 0x20 SET_COEF_INDEX 0x07

nid = 0x20, verb = 0x500, param = 0x7

value = 0x0

# ./hda-verb /dev/snd/hwC0D0 0x20 GET_PROC_COEF 0

nid = 0x20, verb = 0xc00, param = 0x0

value = 0x1800

# ./hda-verb /dev/snd/hwC0D0 0x20 SET_COEF_INDEX 0x07

nid = 0x20, verb = 0x500, param = 0x7

value = 0x0

# ./hda-verb /dev/snd/hwC0D0 0x20 SET_PROC_COEF 0x1880

x86_64 versus x86 on ASUS eee

Use x86, hands down. I installed Fedora x86_64 on my ASUS eee 1001p with 1G of RAM and that was a mistake. In hindsight, it makes complete sense: 64-bit addressing makes programs take up lots more space in memory (because the pointers and stored memory addresses are twice as large) which makes systems with not much RAM not work as well. When I reverted back to an x86 Fedora, WOW! Things went much faster. There was oodles more memory available for applications.

Lesson Learned: Don't use x86_64 unless you absolutely need access to more than 4G of memory. And on my ASUS 1001p laptop, that'll never happen (system can only handle 2G I think) so it just doesn't make sense.