HP dv9000 series laptop with built-in microphone and external microphone input jack

[Harry Wert]

Has anyone found a way to activate the built-in stereo microphone for
the HP 9000 series of HP 17" laptop?  Or, for that matter, a way to
activate the external microphone input on the front of the unit?
Specifically, I have the dv 9210 version with the dual AMD processor. I
have been able to get everything else to work and it is a wonderful
Laptop otherwise.  I am using Ubuntu feisty fawn 7.04, fully updated.

I would like to use the external microphone jack as an input for an
audio cable connected to my WINTV USB2 television module as the shortcut
which I have been using to derive audio from the USB stream "sox -t
ossdsp -r 32000 -b -c 1 /dev/dsp1 -t ossdsp /dev/dsp" which has worked
fine on previous editions of Ubuntu, will randomly disconnect in about 1
to three minutes, requiring the sox command string to be restarted which
is annoying.

Thanks for any help or leads in advance.

Harry Wert
Physicist