Volume/mute/brightness keys stopped working

[Ian Pilcher]

I have a Dell Precision 5520 laptop (basically an XPS 15).  The volume,
mute, and brightness "function" keys have always just worked on this
laptop with no additional configuration required ... until now.

Something has changed in the last week or two, and the keys no longer
have any effect (except that the brightness increase key now toggles
the maximized state of terminal windows).

Anyone else seen this recently?

Assuming no, anyone have any hints on how to debug this?  I'm not really
sure how these function keys work (i.e. are they keypresses, ACPI
events, something else?).

Any thoughts appreciated.  Thanks!

[Jakub Jelen]

On Tue, 2019-08-13 at 03:23 -0500, Ian Pilcher wrote:
> I have a Dell Precision 5520 laptop (basically an XPS 15).  The
> volume,
> mute, and brightness "function" keys have always just worked on this
> laptop with no additional configuration required ... until now.
>
> Something has changed in the last week or two, and the keys no longer
> have any effect (except that the brightness increase key now toggles
> the maximized state of terminal windows).
>
> Anyone else seen this recently?
>
> Assuming no, anyone have any hints on how to debug this?  I'm not
> really
> sure how these function keys work (i.e. are they keypresses, ACPI
> events, something else?).
>
> Any thoughts appreciated.  Thanks!

I think something like this happened to my Thinpad also during last
weeks, but after some time, it started to work again. Did you try to
reboot?

Regards,

[Ted Roche]

See if the Volume/Mute/Brightness works if you hold the "Fn" key
simultaneously. There's an "Fn Lock" setting in the BIOS and/or
software-accessible that gets toggled inadvertently. Just this week, I had
customers complaining their Wifi keeps getting turned off, and their F8 is
no longer working like it used to, and that was the cause.

On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 4:27 AM Ian Pilcher  wrote:
> I have a Dell Precision 5520 laptop (basically an XPS 15).  The volume,
> mute, and brightness "function" keys have always just worked on this
> laptop with no additional configuration required ... until now.
>
> Something has changed in the last week or two, and the keys no longer
> have any effect (except that the brightness increase key now toggles
> the maximized state of terminal windows).
>
> Anyone else seen this recently?
>
> Assuming no, anyone have any hints on how to debug this?  I'm not really
> sure how these function keys work (i.e. are they keypresses, ACPI
> events, something else?).
>
> Any thoughts appreciated.  Thanks!
> --
>
> Ian Pilcher                                         [e-mail]
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[Samuel Sieb]

On 8/13/19 1:23 AM, Ian Pilcher wrote:
> I have a Dell Precision 5520 laptop (basically an XPS 15).  The volume,
> mute, and brightness "function" keys have always just worked on this
> laptop with no additional configuration required ... until now.
>
> Something has changed in the last week or two, and the keys no longer
> have any effect (except that the brightness increase key now toggles
> the maximized state of terminal windows).

Have you tried an earlier kernel to see if that's where the change happened?

[Ian Pilcher]

On 8/13/19 8:51 AM, Ted Roche wrote:
> See if the Volume/Mute/Brightness works if you hold the "Fn" key 
> simultaneously. There's an "Fn Lock" setting in the BIOS and/or 
> software-accessible that gets toggled inadvertently. Just this week, I 
> had customers complaining their Wifi keeps getting turned off, and their 
> F8 is no longer working like it used to, and that was the cause.

This was it.

I had apparently "function locked" the keyboard by accidentally pressing
Fn+Esc.  (Great decision to put that right beside the mute button -
Fn+F1!)

Without any visual indication, and with the Fn+arrow combinations still
working for Home, End, PgUp, PgDown, etc., it's almost impossible to
figure out what's going on.

Thanks!