[ltp] volume/brightness in hardy heron

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

> > The X40 volume buttons are not simple hot keys.  They are a digital volume
> > control for the headphone-out and builtin speakers.  They cannot be
> > configured to just report they have been pressed, so they should not be
> > abused as generic volume keys or somesuch.
> 
> Well, but it used to work much better.  Before hardy heron, I pressed
> those buttons and I got onscreen display showing the the volume going
> up and down and then were perfectly synchronized with the volume
> applet. So, for example, when I pressed the mute button, the on screen

There is no interface for THAT in thinkpad-acpi yet.  The OSD is still
possible using something like tpb or the KDE helpers (which will poll the
NVRAM and waste some battery time).

But hooking these keys to any mixer screws up the dynamic range of the
headphone output and spearkers because it controls the volume twice on two
different mixers with different dynamic ranges.  It is not just a loss of
dynamic range, you get a very non-ideal one at the two extremes.

It is good to know Ubuntu stopped with that screwup.  Now we just need to
give you some O.S.D. applet that just reads the thinkpad mixer itself...

A perfect OSD interface will still take some time to show up.  I am doing
rfkill support right now, an ALSA mixer is the next scheduled feature after
that.

> but this event does not happen anymore. Ditto for brightness.

Yeah.  Now you have to actually go out of your way to break your dynamic
range.  If you still want to do it, just read the thinkpad-acpi docs, it can
do it unless Ubuntu activelly patched the heck out of thinkpad-acpi to avoid
it (which would be weird, I was the one threatening to do it if they didn't
get their act together).

> So, things used to work and now they don't work anymore.

They used to be broken and mislead users, now they don't anymore.  As for
the OSD, you probably need to install one of the thinkpad-specific OSD
applets.

> If I mute now, the sound is mutted but the applet is not aware. What

The applet is not talking to the mixer that is muted.  If you had a dock
and plugged something to line-out, you'd find it is NOT muted.

The issue here is that your lost the feedback that made you believe
everything was fine (the OSD), when in fact it wasn't.  Now everything is
probably fine (I am not sure I understood what you meant about mute/unmute),
but you lost the OSD feedback.

Search for some thinkpad-specific OSD applets, they should work.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh