386. Briefly: Lenovo Thinkpad SL410 mute volume key

I'm a bit tired of the mute button on my keyboard not working (anymore?) on Debian Testing/Wheezy, so it was time to have a look at what could be done.

The issue
On an SL410 there are four buttons to the left of the keyboard: mute mic, volume up, volume down and mute.

Neither of them show up when using xev or showkey. The Volume Up and Down keys work, but not the mute mic or mute volume ones.

You can get the keycodes by monitoring dmesg -- pushing Mute volume three times I get

[ 2392.912282] hda-intel: spurious response 0x0:0x0, last cmd=0x1439000
[ 2393.447050] hda-intel: spurious response 0x0:0x0, last cmd=0x1439000
[ 2393.930206] hda-intel: spurious response 0x0:0x0, last cmd=0x1439000

The problem is that the keycode keeps changing -- the mute key has a different value depending on what the volume is.

mute mic    ?????
vol up/down 0x1439080,0x339080,00,09,13,1b,21,25,29,2d,30,33
mut vol     0x1439000, 339029

Anyway.

Solution

You'll probably find that thinkpad_acpi is loaded:

lsmod|grep thinkpad_acpi

Unload it:

sudo rmmod thinkpad_acpi

Now press the mute button -- did an orange light show under it? That means it's working.

I think the issue is that SL410 isn't a true thinkpad -- it's really an ideapad and the firmware doesn't match.

To make the change permanent,

edit /etc/modprobe.d/thinkpad-blacklist.conf

blacklist thinkpad_acpi

thinkpad_acpi shouldn't load on boot anymore.

Mute mic still doesn't work.