Description of problem: My ThinkPad's "microphone mute" key doesn't work in X anymore (used to work in Fedora 15). Doesn't produce any output in "xev" and I thus can't use it as Gnome shortcut in Control Center. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xorg-x11-drv-keyboard.x86_64 1.6.0-2.fc16 How reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: 1. start xev in terminal 2. press microphone-mute-key 3. notice the missing output in terminal window Actual results: No response from xev in terminal window. Expected results: A key-pressed-event. Used to be Keycode 248 in Fedora 15, and still is in Ubuntu 11.10 and Linux Mint 12 (Beta). Additional info: The key is managed by /dev/input/event6 (ThinkPad Extra Buttons). Other keys managed by this device (e.g. Fn+F8 - touchpad toggle) are working as expected. In tty (Ctrl-Alt-F3), I'm not getting any response in "showkey -s", but I'm getting "Keycode 248" when using "showkey -k". Strangely enough, in Fedora 15 "showkey -k" used to yield "Keycode 240". I tried the tool "getscancodes" from http://keytouch.sourceforge.net/dl-getscancodes.html and applied it on /dev/input/event6. It yields scancode 26 (0x1a), when mic-mute-button is pressed.
from linux/input.h: #define KEY_MICMUTE 248 /* Mute / unmute the microphone */ and #define KEY_UNKNOWN 240 so my guess was that it was simply unknown in f15 but it is known now. the problem you're running into though is the 255 keycode limit in X. Anything that's (kernel keycode + 8 >= 255) cannot be routed by X. sorry. See the upstream bug here: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11227