Volume sound and screen brightness controls not working

Question

Recently I have installed i3 windows manager.

The problem is that the footnote keys to control the volume and brightness don't work.

How can I solve this?

And how can I bind the mod key to the Win key?

Solution 1

Multimedia Keys

First install these packages for brightness and volume:

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install xbacklight alsa-utils pulseaudio

Then from I3 FAQ:

Add these lines to ~/.config/i3/config

# Pulse Audio controls
bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec --no-startup-id pactl -- set-sink-volume 0 +5% #increase sound volume
bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec --no-startup-id pactl -- set-sink-volume 0 -5% #decrease sound volume
bindsym XF86AudioMute exec --no-startup-id pactl set-sink-mute 0 toggle # mute sound

# Sreen brightness controls
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec xbacklight -inc 20 # increase screen brightness
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec xbacklight -dec 20 # decrease screen brightness

---

Mod key

To change the $mod key:

• Open ~/.config/i3/config.

• Look for the line:

  set $mod
  

• Change that to:

  set $mod Mod4
  

• Finally, run i3-msg reload to reload the configuration file.

Solution 2

For volume, i used the command "amixer",

First, make sure you hava all the devices enabled, to see that first type

amixer

That should give tou the 'Master' state [on] or [off]

If it is [off], Set it to [on] by typing

amixer sset Master on

.

Now changing the default code of:

# Pulse Audio controls
bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec --no-startup-id pactl set-sink-volume 2 +5% #increase sound volume
bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec --no-startup-id pactl set-sink-volume 2 -5% #decrease sound volume
bindsym XF86AudioMute exec --no-startup-id pactl set-sink-mute 0 toggle

to this one:

bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec amixer sset Master 5%+
bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec amixer sset Master 5%-
bindsym XF86AudioMute exec amixer sset Master toggle

This command increase that percentage to all the output devices

Works perfect for me

Solution 3

xbacklight doesn't work for me. I wrote this script which writes directly into the kernel exposed back-light files, at least for intel:

https://github.com/jappeace/brightnessctl

I had to do a reinstall recently and just now made a makefile to make installation easier. This is just an alternative for if the xbacklight solution doesn't work for you either.

Solution 4

Well it's a variant of the same instructions as always, but for me I found light by haikarainen to work best over a variety of hardware:

So in your i3 config file, set:

bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec light -U 10
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec light -A 10

Then simply reload with $mod+Shift+c or i3-msg reload or by directly restarting the WM.

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Comments

[quidproquo]

if xbacklight doesn't work for you, see github.com/haikarainen/light

[blkpws]

Works perfectly on Ubuntu 17.04!

[Gabriel Ziegler]

I had to use bindsym XF86AudioMute exec amixer -D set Master 1+ toggle for toggling to work fine.

[Chitral Verma]

+1 as xbacklight doesn't work out of the box with ubuntu 18.04

[Dzintars]

I think it should be slightly modified if you have several sound cards.