Media and Custom Keyboard shortcut, as well as volume / brightness OSD stop randomly working

[Erik M]

I run Ubuntu 14.04, on a Lenovo T420s.

When I restart and login to Unity, everything works fine. Once I dock the laptop (and I also think, when I suspend and re-wake the laptop), many keyboard shortcuts stop working: custom shortcuts, and some media shortcuts. I noticed that also the Volume and brightness OSD stop working at that instant. I note that everything works fine again when I reboot the system while being docked. Hence, it seems not the docking per se that causes the problem, but a process associated with docking (and presumably

I've looked at similar posts, but they all seem to origin in 2012, and the circumstances, where the shortcuts or OSD fail to work, are different.

Can anyone help, and assist me in identifying the source and precise circumstances, to create a useful bug report, or finding a fix?

[Erik M (erik-martens)]

I have made some further tests:
- I cannot confirm that suspend and rewake yield the same failures (even after 5 cycles of suspend+rewake, docked or not docked).
- undocking causes the failure of OSD and shortcuts
- One time (but not consistently) I got the error message, following the suggestion of submitting a bug report, that notify-OSD had crashed. No word regarding shortcuts. Strangely, shortcuts and OSD kept working. I could not submit the report, since the report application crashed itself.

[Erik M (erik-martens)]

Update:
In this context, the failure of keyboard shortcuts is either related with a crash of
notify-osd
or
unity-settings-daemon

[Erik M (erik-martens)]

Resetting unity appears to fix the keyboard shortcuts, using

unity-tweak-tool --reset

[Erik M (erik-martens)]

It seems though, the errors are back now, after a few days. A system update occurred meanwhile, but probably it is unrelated.

[Erik M (erik-martens)]

A workaround is to either open a terminal or Alt+F2 and issue the command 'unity' . This fixes the shortcuts by restarting unity, but all applications keep running, wihout login/out.

You may want to try to run this command on resume|thaw in /usr/lib/pm-utils, since the keyboards (for me) seem to get lost on docking/undocking and related resumes; but I'm still testing, so i don't now if this is a robust (automatic) workaround.