Thinkpad X60 volume keys do not show feedback notification

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Binary package hint: notify-osd

I'm using a Thinkpad X60. Volume up, down and mute keys do not seem to be working. I see no notification, and Gnome Volume Control applet doesn't respond to them either.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Hi Mark,

This appears to be a duplicate of bug #357673, and the flipside of bug #355300.

The problem is that on ThinkPads, these buttons *also* have an effect at the hardware level; we have previously been overriding the defaults of the thinkpad-acpi module to force these button presses to be exposed to userspace, but there is no way to disable the action in hardware, so we end up with double handling.

The short-term fix for this is to /not/ override the kernel module and expose these keypresses to userspace. This has the unfortunate side-effect of leaving us without OSD for these keys, but this is effectively because hal/gnome-settings-daemon are not equipped to deal with this kind of "notification-only" mixer event, and there are currently no standard linux input key events defined for this.

In the long term, we need a good way to expose these mixer changes to userspace, but reverting to the previous behavior isn't more correct than what we're currently doing.