Going Skype on Fedora Core Level 6

I've finally created an account for Skype and did a quick accept of the license and conditions:

• Skype End User License Agreement
• Terms of Service
• Skype Privacy Statement

I sure hope that there's nothing nasty in them and expect that the wisdom of the crowd would have made a storm over it otherwise. Getting it running on my Linux box (Fedora Core Level 6) was very easy, except for enabling capturing. There's a guide called Skype for Linux Repositories that shows how to add a Skype repository, so that it can be installed and maintained with yum. Eventhough it installs skype-1.3.0.53-fc5 it works without a glitch (so far) on level 6. My only problem was getting the mic to work or more precisely to capture from the mic. I use a Logitech USB 350 headset, primarily for listening to music but I've also tried it for VOIP with SJLabs softphone,SJphone. The Skype Test Call went though and I heard the intro, I could here myself speaking but it was not echoed. I did some googling and found a related post about it: mic recording alsa arecord. The answer was right, but in a more tricky way because of a UI buf in alsamixer. Here's what is shown with view set to all

where it's not clear whether capturing is enabled (can be enabled/disable with space), but if I switch to only capturing

it's clear.

The output with the amixer commandline tool was before:

Simple mixer control 'Mic',0
  Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined cvolume pswitch pswitch-joined cswitch cswitch-joined
  Playback channels: Mono
  Capture channels: Mono
  Limits: Playback 0 - 464 Capture 0 - 13
  Mono: Playback 464 [100%] [-13.16dB] [on] Capture 13 [100%] [29.00dB] [off]
Simple mixer control 'Speaker',0
  Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined
  Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Playback 0 - 44
  Mono:
  Front Left: Playback 18 [41%] [-23.00dB] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 17 [39%] [-24.00dB] [on]

and afterwards (I've highlighted the difference):

Simple mixer control 'Mic',0
  Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined cvolume pswitch pswitch-joined cswitch cswitch-joined
  Playback channels: Mono
  Capture channels: Mono
  Limits: Playback 0 - 464 Capture 0 - 13
  Mono: Playback 464 [100%] [-13.16dB] [on] Capture 13 [100%] [29.00dB] [on]
Simple mixer control 'Speaker',0
  Capabilities: pvolume pswitch pswitch-joined
  Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Playback 0 - 44
  Mono:
  Front Left: Playback 17 [39%] [-24.00dB] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 17 [39%] [-24.00dB] [on]