Qball's Weblog

Tags General  gnome 

This is something most more experienced gnome users will know, but today I could actually help somebody with it. So I will do a short writedown:

The Problem:

The volume up/down button on the keybord controls the Master mixer, but on his system this didn’t work, so he wanted to control the PCM mixer.

The obvious solution:

Change the mixer gnome adjust, but I (and a few others) didn’t know how todo this.

The hack-around:

1.

From the Keyboard Shortcut editor of gnome write down the keycode for volume up/down. Then remove them. (we want the keys unbind for now).

In my case this was something like:

Volume up: 0xb0
Volume Down: 0xae

2.

Now start gconf-editor

goto: /apps/metacity/global_keybindings

edit the run_command_1 and set the value to 0xb0
edit the run_command_2 and set the value to 0xae

Now goto /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands

edit the command_1 and set the value to ‘amiser sset PCM 10%+ on’
edit the command_2 and set the value to ‘amiser sset PCM 10%+ on’

(you can find amixer in alsa-utils package)

Now you should be able to control the correct mixer from your Volume keys on the keyboard. (in steps of 10%, but this can easily be changed).

I have nothing against gconf, but it is slowly becoming a huge dump of unknown (yet often useful) program options. If I run a clean system, I spend several minutes in gconf-editor tweaking some small stuff to fits my needs. Normal/new users won’t need todo this but maybe some UI guru’s could give gconf-editor a bit easier to access interface.