Intrepid broke my laptop's mute button.

[Toby Bartels]

Binary package hint: alsa-utils

I run Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron E1505. This comes with some volume control buttons on the front side of the keyboard. When I was running Hardy, the mute button, volume-up button, and volume-down buttons worked. Now that I upgraded to Intrepid, the mute button no longer works, although the volume-up and volume-down buttons are still fine.

Note that I can still mute and unmute through all of the usual GUI interfaces. I believe that the interface between these buttons and GNOME is handled through the Keyboard Shortcuts, which I find under System -> Preferences. This describes the mute button as XF86AudioMute, which may or may not be what it called the mute button under Hardy. (The volume-down and volume-up buttons, which work, are called XF86LowerVolume and XF86RaiseVolume.) If I set a new Keyboard Shortcut by pressing the mute button, it returns XF86AudioMute again, but the button still doesn't work.

[goto (gotolaunchpad)]

I have a similar problem (maybe this has to do with it):
I used my volume-up and volume-down to lower or higher the volume. And in Hardy I used "shift-volumeup" and "shift-volumedown" to go to the next/previous track. The combinations don't work in Intrepid any more. Maybe your mute button uses internally a combination which causes the fail.

[goto (gotolaunchpad)]

Confirmed due to duplicate. Problem seems to exist on a Dell Inspiron-1525, too.

[Toby Bartels (tobybartels)]

I just remembered that my laptop also has volume-control keys on Fn-PageUp (XF86RaiseVolume), Fn-PageDn (XF86LowerVolume), and Fn-End (XF86AudioMute). Here too, the first two work but NOT the mute control.

[Adrian Jadic (jadic)]

I have an HP 2617us laptop and although I can still mute from the laptop's button the light on the button does not change any more. In Hardy it was changing colour from blue (ON) to orange (MUTED).

[Sven Berkvens-Matthijsse (sven-launchpad)]

This affects me too on my desktop PC. I have a wireless keyboard with volume and mute buttons on it. The volume buttons work fine but the mute button does not work. I too have tried whether the key code in the Keyboard Shortcuts program was wrong, but pressing the mute button there returns the same code (XF86AudioMute) as was there before.

[Toby Bartels (tobybartels)]

This may be related to Bug #9441. I find that if I turn off Locate Pointer (under System -> Preferences -> Mouse), then the problem goes away. But when I turn Locate Pointer back on, then the problem reappears.

Can the other people with this problem see if Locate Pointer has anything to do with it?

[Sven Berkvens-Matthijsse (sven-launchpad)]

Turning off "Locate Pointer" indeed solves my problem. It also restores functionality to my Play/Pause, Rewind and Forward keyboard shortcuts, which didn't work anymore either, just as Mute didn't.

This must be a very weird bug...

Thank you for your suggestion, Toby!

[Sven Berkvens-Matthijsse (sven-launchpad)]

By the way, the solution by Toby also solves bug #188702 for me (Mute button that doesn't work).

[Sven Berkvens-Matthijsse (sven-launchpad)]

Uh, I meant: bug #188702 (Multimedia buttons that do not work).

[Cay Horstmann (cay)]

On my Thinkpad T500 with an external Logitech wave keyboard, hitting the mute button merely toggles a pretty red x on the screen without affecting the actual sound. Similarly, selecting mute in the volume control applet has no effect. The mute button on the laptop works as it should.

I do not have "locate pointer" activated.

[Toby Bartels (tobybartels)]

Cay, that's interesting. Have you put this in as a separate bug report? Unless we know this is caused by the same bug, you'll get a better response for your own problem if you make your own bug report.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported, but feel free to report any other bugs you find.
Closing the bug as duplicate since there is already some bugs about locate pointer issues

[Levy (michel-levy)]

same thing happens in jaunty : the buttons volume mute, down and up do not work.