Ubuntu 8.04 and Media Keys

In my ongoing series of articles I've written about Ubuntu 8.04 I've described some of the issues I've had with it "out of the box" so to speak. Now don't get me wrong, with some tweaking I've managed to get everything fully functioning and running smoothly. Except my media keys on my HP laptop.

I was getting pretty sick and tired of always having to adjust the volume manually because one video podcast was way louder or quieter than another one so I actually took the time to figure out why my media keys weren't working and how I can "fix" them to make them work.

Lets just say the solution was super simple and super easy and that I should have been able to solve the problem a long time ago if I had just sat down and thought about the problem, instead I was too caught up on the other things that weren't working.

Well, here is how I fixed my problem. I opened up my master volume window and from the File menu, I read the drop down options. On my laptop, there were four options with the first one selected. Now after reading the release notes oh so long ago and knowing that Ubuntu 8.04 had switched to PulseAudio as the back end audio platform, I was questioning why my audio device was NOT PulseAudio but instead the Conextant Audio Source. So I changed the radio button to the first PulseAudio and voila, my media buttons now work.

Don't worry, I'm still banging my head against a wall for not figuring out that one sooner.