Thinkpad hotkeys do not work after updating from 9.04 Beta

[Alex Ferguson]

I made a clean Ubuntu 9.04 Beta installation on my IBM Thinkpad R50e on the 10th of April. All hotkeys worked fine, including volume up/down, brightness up/down. The popups provided accurate information, and everything was set up fine.

After updating Ubuntu sometime between the 10th and the 13th of April, the volume, brightness and power buttons stopped producing any graphical response. The keys themselves are functional thanks to the BIOS, but they do not produce events neither under "input-events" or "acpi_listen" or "xev".

The kernel does seem to recognize the existence of these hotkeys, as evidenced by the output of "lshal" (which I've attached, along with other information), but there seems to be no way of accessing them as keyevents.

I've attached information which I hope will be helpful in finding the cause of this bug.

[Alex Ferguson (b-linuz)]

Downgrading to linux-image-2.6.28-11-generic 2.6.28-11.37 did not fix the problem as I expected it to do. This could be a problem with another part of the subsystem.

[Matt Ziegelbaum (mziegelbaum)]

I can confirm this bug on a Thinkpad T43p (type 2687-M8U). At some point last week, after updating, OSD disappeared. Xev, acpi_listen, etc don't reflect any events for volume up/down/mute, brightness up/down, and thinklight. The AccessIBM button and a few others (Fn-F3, for example) do still produce acpi events.

[Andy Whitcroft (apw)]

Tthe issue seems to be a side effect of the fix for bug #355300, those laptops have hardware volume actions and the software ones have been stopped to avoid duplication. This new issue is being tracked on bug #357673, marking this bug a duplicate of that.