It never has been outstanding. At any rate, support for this device has been
included in the 2.6.31 Linux kernel,
which is installed by Ubuntu Karmic among other distros. However, there
still does not seem to be support for microphone input. Is there a way
to overcome this limitation, and use a microphone with the current
2.6.31 kernel? (If it's Ubuntu-specific, perhaps compiling a kernel
obtained from kernel.org would be the answer.)