how to configure volume control button on laptop

[twadhwa]

hey guyz i m using fc4 on my compaq V2148 notebook, the sound is working gr8 but it wud be gr8 if i cud use the volume control buttons on my laptop which i m not able to use at the moment . any solns ??

[Deore]

With KMix you can configure General Shortcuts - there are controls for volume up, down and mute. They expect key (combination) as shortcuts, but on many laptops the volume keys are already mapped as some combination. So try to use them there - just press the corresponding key in the KMix shortcuts config. If the buttons are not mapped you should do that yourself first - check with google what is the app name to help you with that (I can't remember it now, but I used it with FC3).

[twadhwa]

i guess u are mentioning abt the lineak project but i am not able to use it properly , can any1 help???

[ekimd]

In FC4, you should be able to go to
System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts
and then specify a button for the volume up, down, and mute, I have a Compaq nw8240 and it works great on mine. The mute LED even lights up when I press the mute button.

If your laptop has volume up/down buttons but doesn't recognize the keys when you try to assign them, then you need to make them visible to the system with the "showkey -s" and "setkeycodes" commands. That's what I have to do on my system. I made a startup script in /etc/init.d to automatically perform all the setkeycodes commands for my system on boot. The following pages may be useful:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Keyboard-a...-HOWTO-14.html
http://lackof.org/matt/hacking/keyboard/

[Deore]

Thanks ekimd, that's exactly what I meant but couldn't remember! I will actualy have to do the same thing now again...

[ekimd]

Originally Posted by twadhwa

actually u mentioned abt the showkey and setkeycodes commands , thanksa a lot for that , but i m really confused as to how to use them . plz elaborate a bit if possible , also how to create the initialization script . one more question , when i press my keyboard's volume keys i get scan codes and keycodes by showkey command but xev also givesthe same , but the output is diff from both commands , how is this possible???

The problem is that X can return different scan codes than the tty console. It's pretty confusing to try to explain the reason why. You'll probably have to try both to see which one works for you. You could try googling around to see if anyone with your keyboard lists the proper scan codes.

As for an initialization script, here's the one I use. Save it in the /etc/init.d directory, and call it something like inetkeys.

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/setkeycodes e023 200
/usr/bin/setkeycodes e01f 201
/usr/bin/setkeycodes e01a 202
/usr/bin/setkeycodes e01e 203

echo "keycode 200 = F21" >  /tmp/myKey
echo "keycode 201 = F22" >> /tmp/myKey
echo "keycode 202 = F23" >> /tmp/myKey
echo "keycode 203 = F24" >> /tmp/myKey

loadkeys /tmp/myKey 2> /dev/null

Then just make a link to it in rc5.d:
ln -s /etc/init.d/inetkeys /etc/rc5.d/S11inetkeys

[Fezzik]

Thank you. I have never looked at that thing and I was able to set up a few things that helped me out a lot. I really appreciate it. The Keyboard Shortcuts thing worked for me.

[knocker]

in my case,

i have a small scrolling-wheel for volume up/down. but with the "showkey"-command it is not detected.

the "FN"-button is also not detected, so what can i do then?

[Fezzik]

I used the graphic key setting thing. I had those buttons on the side of my computer that controlled all the volume stuff. It recognized those as some kind of command or combination. What it does is basically starts up waiting for you to press the key combination you want to use. I would think when it starts waiting for volume up you can scroll the thing up and it should send the key combination that is assigned to it. Then that is just a guess. I am not sure it may use the same command I don't know but it recognized my wierd buttons and gave them somekind of designation when I pushed them to set them up as volume up and down and mute. I even set up others to control dvd's and eject. I liked it.