I have been doing this may be for almost a year now.
Go to the alsa page to frequently check for new releases of the driver and go through the change log to find out whether my cursed sound card gets a little bit more support. Yes, I am one of the few unfortunate souls who have this combination of Linux addiction with non Linux hardware. I have been dreaming of getting Skype to work on my machine. The hardware I am talking about is the Nvidia MCP51 (rev a2) integrated sound card that HP integrated into my cool 64 bit dual core laptop. The alsa guys came up with the third release candidate for the 1.0.14 release yesterday. I was, as usual, excited and hoping for a patch that would make sound capture work on this card (I know this works with some configurations) Scanning through the change log wasn't that exciting. The only changes to hda-intel driver (alsa detects the above card as hda-intel) was :
HDA Intel driver -
hda-intel - Don't try to probe invalid codecs
hda-intel - Add black/whitelist for position_fix option
Duh!! Is this patch going to make sound capture work ?!! I am skeptical. Now people would say "Why don't /you/ try to write a patch ? " And I would give few of the many available reasons : course load, work blah blah :)