[EN] [solved] hardware volume keys not working

[viniosity]

Managed to get the xfce flavor of Siduction installed on my XPS 13. Most of the hardware keys work (brightness, backlit keyboard, etc) but volume keys do not.

Out of the box, audio didn't work for me. I had to install pulseaudio and blacklist snd-hda-intel. I wonder if the hardware keys are trying to manipulate alsa? How can I make sure I'm using one sound system and that it's wired up properly to the hardware keys?

[devil]

If you usePulseaudio, Alsa is still underlying. Depending on the apps ability to work with Pulseausdio, the following happens:

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Soundsource → PulseAudio → ALSA-Driver → Hardwareor

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Soundsource → Alsa → Pulseaudio →  ALSA-Driver → Hardware
Anyways, to get your keys to do what you want, you should read about xev.


greetz
devil

[viniosity]

It's strange, in XFCE it recognizes it correctly as XF86AudioLowerVolume and I can set it in keyboard shortcuts to this (which works at the command line)

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amixer set Master 5%-


But then pressing the key after setting the shortcut doesn't do anything. The mute key gives me a popup but doesn't actually mute the volume. But the regular volume up/down don't give any on screen pop-ups.


Sort of out of ideas...

[devil]

Maybe this page helps (scroll down): https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15


greetz
devil

[viniosity]

It turns out that the volume keys work fine in E17 which lead me to think it's just XFCE somewhere that's mis-behaving. Sure enough if you launch the Settings Editor, you can switch the "active-card" to the correct one (in the case of the XPS13 it's "HDAIntelPCHAlsamixer". Once that's done, hardware keys work as expected.

[emarsk]

I see you found a fix, I post my take on the subject anyway because maybe it can help others that may have a related but different issue.

I use plain Openbox and in order to enable volume keys I need to run volumeicon or some similar applet (I added it to my .xinitrc).
It's a small applet which sets itself in the tray area and amongst its preferences you can enable/disable the volume keys (or even use different shortcuts).