I've been having trouble getting Fedora to work with my microphone. I can shout into it until I'm blue in the face and hear myself through the speakers, but recording and using Skype / Ekiga gave me no love. Fortunately, there is a solution:
The gist of the problem is the AC97 levels weren't up. Why that has anything to do with the levels for recording is going to have to be someone else's job, because I can't figure it out, personally.
Sometimes I love Linux. This is one of those other times.