Economy Size Geek

Ok I have a HP Pavilioin zv5000. It has a bunch of those special buttons on it (www,photo, music, volume). When it’s in the dock it has a handy buttons for voulume control and muting. Since I got sound to work - I thought wouldn’t it be cool if those buttons worked as well.

Guess what they do!

Thanks to LinEAK project which supports my keyboard I was able to set it up. Basically I added the deb.

Run:

lineakd -l

This gives you a list of keyboards

lineakd -c HPzv5000

This gives you a sample config file for my keyboard. Now on to control sound.

amixer

Turns out ALSA sound comes with a neat little command line program called amixer which you can use to adjust your volume and toggle mute. The only annoying thing is that when you mute and unmute it sets your volume to 0. I adjusted it so it now sets it at 40% here’s my config


AudioLowerVolume = "/usr/bin/amixer -c 0 sset Headphone 1-"
AudioMute = "/usr/bin/amixer -c 0 sset Headphone toggle;/usr/bin/amixer -c 0 sset Headphone 40%"
AudioRaiseVolume = "/usr/bin/amixer -c 0 sset Headphone 1+"
WWW = "/usr/bin/mozilla"


Start up

Ok I feel like a dork because I didn’t know how to do this. Basically to get it to startup when you start gnome you need to build a shell script to get it started. Mine contains:


( /usr/bin/lineakd -f ~/.lineak/lineakd.conf >/dev/null ) &


This basically forks a shell and puts it in the background.

Now go to Gnome Menu-> Desktop Preferences ->Advanced -> Sessions

On the last tab “Startup Programs” click on “Add” browse to your script and viola you have special buttons working.