Having problem with getting the Volume Up/Down & Mute/Unmute buttons on your Packard Bell EasyNote MX36 and Linux?

This might work for as it did for me. I was frustrated that these simple three buttons didn’t work anymore in Linux, those I’ve been running anyway(ubuntu & openSUSE), they used to work up till version 8.04 of ubuntu, in openSUSE i don’t know if they ever worked.

It seems that these buttons is at least on my machine connected to ACPI events and doesn’t get discovered correctly by the system, my other buttons such as brightness worked as the should.

Discovering these three specific events for the sound was fairly easy, i ran acpi_listen in a console and saw the event id’s unfold in front of me, the hard thing was to get them to be mapped correctly.

After long tedious hours my final solution was to create my on script invoking the acpi_listen command and catching these events and send them where they belonged.

This script can be run as an ordinary user without problem, i have’nt tested it yet running as root on my machine. By adding it to your window manager startup you should get these fabulous buttons to work.

If you don’t have a MX36 from Packard Bell use can still test this script and see if it works for you. You can check the script and see what it does and if you need to change it do so as it is free to modify it according to the BSDL License.

Script: pb_acpi_events.sh

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Desktop, Scripts, Tips, Ubuntu, Unix/Linux, openSUSE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.