Volume button no longer repeats

[Cavia Porcellus]

When volume buttons are held down, they do not repeat as expected. The buttons therefore need to be pressed multiple times for each increment of volume.

This was broken by a 16.04 update; the buttons work just fine using a 16.04 live cd without any updates. Unfortunately I'm not sure what package broke this. I did test older kernels and that's not the issue. It's also not an indicator-sound package issue, since the Xenial package has not been upgraded.

The xev command shows that the buttons are repeating properly, but that, for some reason, does not translate into the volume going up or down.

There is one situation where they do work as expected: if they user has already clicked the sound indicator. As long as the sound indicator menu is open, the holding down the volume keys will cause the volume to go up and down repeatedly as normal.

Others with the same issue, for reference:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/781802/volume-key-repeat-stop-working

I'm using a ThinkPad 420s. A few people on Ask Ubuntu also seem to have Thinkpads, so I'm not sure if it's a Lenovo-specific issue.

Thanks.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Joseph Salisbury (jsalisbury)]

Would it be possible for you to test the latest upstream stable kernel? Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Please test the latest v4.4 stable kernel[0].

If this bug is fixed in the mainline kernel, please add the following tag 'kernel-fixed-upstream'.

If the mainline kernel does not fix this bug, please add the tag: 'kernel-bug-exists-upstream'.

If you are unable to test the mainline kernel, for example it will not boot, please add the tag: 'kernel-unable-to-test-upstream'.
Once testing of the upstream kernel is complete, please mark this bug as "Confirmed".

Thanks in advance.

[0] http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.4.14-xenial/

[Cavia Porcellus (caviaporcellus)]

Sorry, just realized my original description said that the buttons worked fine with a "16.06" live cd... someone changed it to "16.10," but what I meant was 16.04 (Xenial). That is, Xenial as it was released in April works fine, but some update broke the functionality.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

that's probably an unity issue see bug #1586491