Hello.

When I first installed Debian (when Ubuntu dropped powerpc support a while ago), I noticed that when I changed the volume with the keyboard, the volume popup window that I had gotten used to from Ubuntu did not appear, even though the volume level changed. So, after some research, I found that by setting the the keys as shortcuts in the gnome keyboard shortcuts preference, I had my volume popup back, and volume control worked fine.

About a week ago, keyboard volume control stopped working correctly. If I hit volume up, the window would appear, and the level indicator might go up, but the balance was off. I opened gnome volume control and I noticed that when I pressed the volume up button, one volume slider went up a different amount than the other slider.

I also noticed that if I tried this while watching a movie, like in mplayer, one volume slider could even go down while pressing the up button.

However, if I unset the keys in gnome keyboard preferences, the keys still control the volume, and maintain the balance. Why would they work without Gnome, and why would letting them be controlled by Gnome cause the balance to go off?

I am running Debian testing on a ppc with the 2.6.18 kernel.

Thank you for any help with this problem,
Sean

there's a very interesting doc that talks about multimedia keyboard keys in Linux. It has extensive information about configuring multimedia keys under different linux environments (including the X server itself). You can even control the amount of volume raising!
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Use_Multimedia_Keys
happy configuring !

Ok. I read through the page, and, after running find on my computer, I found that I didn't have any Xmodmap files anywhere on the system. So, I setup the keymaps and ran xmodmap as described in the article, but when I reset the keybindings in gnome (again, following the instructions in the article), I still had the same problem – the one channel moved more than the other channel (though, again, if I left gnome unset volume control still worked, but gnome was not aware of it). You mentioned you can control the amount the system raises the volume when you strike a key, and I saw a references to that in the article if you use the remoot script you can control how much alsa changes when you press a volume key. Is there a way to set that for gnome volume control? Also, if I don't have any modmap files on my system, how is it possible that the system volume (alsa) still changes when I press a volume key?

Thank you for your help,
Sean

There's an easy way to enable multimedia keys correctly including configuring them. Try using keyTouch (which I recommend) or LinEAK:

keyTouch
LinEAK

I hope that it will resolve all your problems.

Thank you for the information. I'm looking into both options.

I'm worried though that LinEAK or keyTouch will suffer the same conflict with the current volume controller that Gnome currently does. I was curious, on debian, do you know where the default media keyboard info is (the stuff Debian sets up when you install Debian) – if I wanted to disable the current keyboard volume control to prevent conflicts with LinEAK or keyTouch, how would I do that? I'm not sure what program is currently telling alsa that a specific keypress means volume up or down. Does alsa have its own keyboard control?

Thank you everyone for all of your help with this.

Regards,
Sean