Hi folks,

I finally convinced my wife to switch to Linux, and have CentOS 5.3 installed.  Having such a great media player as Amarok available was of course key to getting her to switch because this is one of her main applications.  Kudos for some great work!

Of course she almost instantly noticed that it did not work with the multimedia buttons on the front of her laptop - volume control, pause, etc.  I'm not sure if this is something I'd talk to you all about, or to the CentOS folks.

Is there any way to get that going?  She has a Dell Inspiron 6000 if that matters.

thanks!
-Alan

This is probably due to either a missing package that allows to use the laptop keys, or a wrong setting in Kmix.

For the latter, try to change the master channel, sometimes it's the only obstacle for the use of the laptop media keys. FWIW, the media keys on my Lenovo work out of the box with Amarok 2 and KDE4.

This is good news - thanks!  I'll give it a go

OK, kmix was not there so I installed kdemultimedia to get it, and rebooted.  Does it matter that I run Gnome (which I think is the default for Centos 5.3)

I load kmix and I do not see any readily obvious way to "change master channel".  It is  not even clear to me from looking through all the kmix settings, what that means.

OK, lots more digging.  I got started in KDE and got into the settings and saw special settings for both Sony Viao and IBM Thinkpad laptops (which are made by Lenovo).  So I'm guessing that the special buttons are only supported on these 2.  Can someone please confirm that before I waste too much more time?

CentOS 5.3 uses KDE 3.5.4 as far as I know. So I assume you're talking about Amarok 1.4.x.
But generally special buttons are handled by acpi daemon (system) and or kernel. So you need the kernel modules for Dell laptops loaded and special keys enabled via hotkeys.
Try this google search.
This is not Amarok related, sorry

Greetings
m0nk

Danke Dieter - ich gucke mal was es bei der Suche zu finden gibt

Prost!

thi is simple to do - open Settings - Congiure Shortcuts - find your feature and assign key that you need to this action

rodislav wrote:thi is simple to do - open Settings - Congiure Shortcuts - find your feature and assign key that you need to this action

Naah, it's not that way simple.
First of all we're talking about Amarok 1.4.x, second special keys on a Dell/Lenovo/Sony are "special" keys, which can be handled through the BIOS, a kernel module or are acting as ordinary keys.

m0nk