[ltp] Volume buttons turn microphone on

[Richard Neill]

Phil wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I'm running Ubuntu 7.04 on a T60 2007-63G. Everything seems to work well 
> (although suspend to ram failed today for the first time :-( but I have 
> a problem with the keyboard volume buttons. Instead of raising/lowering 
> Master volume they raise/lower the Playback Microphone volume. Looking 
> in /etc/acpi it seems that the button presses fire the 
> vol[up|down]btn.sh scripts, which use acpi_fakekey to insert a 
> KEY_VOLUMEUP/DOWN keypress, but I can't work out what happens next.
> 
> Incidentally initiating a call on skype also frigs with the microphone 
> recording settings - reducing the level so that the other party can't 
> hear what I'm saying, but I can't anywhere to configure this.

amixer  is probably what you want here - you can use it to fix the mixer 
as you want it - just discard existing scripts.

As for skype, I think skype uses the OSS sound system, not ALSA. THat 
means that it uses a different interface, and probably requires 
exclusive access to the sound card. How about a wrapper script: 
skypewrapper.sh


#!/bin/bash
alsactl -f levels.tmp store  #save mixer levels
skype &
skype_pid=$!		#pid of skype
sleep 1
amixer sset [SOMETHING]  #fix the Mic levels.
wait $skype_pid		#wait for skype to close
alsactl -f levels.tmp store  #restore mixer levels


Or, you could try ekiga instead.

HTH,

Richard