Hello! I have my laptop for a year now, and ever since i've been trying to fix the sound. Playback works out-of-the box, but recording was always messy. Anyway, recent updates in alsa-driver (shipped with kernel 2.6.31) have completely fixed all sound issues! I have no idea what change actually did the trick, but internal mic was not working before.

So, to be exact

Hardware:

HP tx2100er laptop, AMD64, nforce2 chipset.

Audio: Realtek ALC861-VD attached to an nForce2 southbridge, subvendor 0x103c device 0x30e5 see alsa-info output in attachement.

Soft: gentoo and all common alsa libs (latest versions).

So, thank you for great job and if you need to find out why it works don't hesitate to ask for more info - just mail me.

Best regards, Alex Pyattaev