ezyang's blog

the arc of software bends towards understanding

Xmonad and media keys on Saucy

October 27, 2013

Ubuntu continues on its rampage of breaking perfectly good software, and on my most recent upgrade to Saucy Salamander, I discovered to my dismay that my media keys (e.g. volume keys, fn (function) keys, suspend button, etc) had stopped working. Of course, it worked fine if I logged into my user using Unity, but who wants to use a silly window manager like that…

The root problem, according to these Arch Linux forum posts is that Gnome has moved media-key support out of gnome-settings-daemon (which any self-respecting Xmonad user is sure to spawn) and into their window manager proper. Which, of course, is no good because I don’t want to use their window manager!

For now, it seems the simplest method of bringing back this functionality is to run a 3.6 version of gnome-settings-daemon. Fortunately, at least for Saucy, there are a few builds of 3.6 available before they upgraded to 3.8. So, all you need to do is grab these two deb files appropriate for your architecture (you need gnome-control-center too, because it has a dependency on gnome-settings-daemon):

Once you’ve downloaded the appropriate deb files, a dpkg -i $DEBFILE and then apt-mark hold gnome-control-center gnome-settings-daemon should do the trick. You should run an aptitude upgrade to make sure you haven’t broken any other dependencies (for example, gnome-shell). (Power-users can add the debs to a local repo and then downgrade explicitly from apt-get.)

Moving forward, we will probably be forced to reimplement media key bindings in some other software package, and it would be nice if this could be standardized in some way. Linux Mint has already forked gnome-settings-daemon, with their cinnamon-settings-daemon, but I’ve not tried it, and have no idea how well it works.

Update. Trusty has an updated version of this package which restores support, so I am providing backports via my PPA.

32 Comments

  1. thouters
    Why is this Ubuntu’s fault exactly?
  2. Edward Z. Yang
    It might not be; I’ve just gotten in the habit of blaming all problems related to window managers to Ubuntu, since they’re in the habit of making lots of changes there ^^.
  3. nonesuch

    haskell planet feedback. why are U using Ubuntu or ‘garbage software’ and NOT FreeBSD?

    the tests 1.)closed 2.)developer code review 3.)much too widespread and bloated - debian 4.)code copying and code smells 5.)

  4. Anonymous
    Why don’t you submit a patch? It works under gnome panel, which is an Ubuntu fix.
  5. Edward Z. Yang

    Well, it’s not a case where the problem is “patchable.” Gnome has specifically decided that the functionality does not belong in gnome-session-daemon. I should probably file a feature request though.

    gnome-panel is a way to get things to work, but there’s no way to run gnome-panel, without the panel, if you know what I mean ;)

  6. nagisa
    You might want to look at how I put MPRIS into my XMonad (https://github.com/nagisa/sysconf/blob/master/home/config/xmonad/lib/MPRIS.hs) and possibly do the same.
  7. Chris Warburton

    Meh, gnome-settings-daemon requires all kinds of bloated gnome stuff to be installed as dependencies. I map my volume keys to amixer using xbindkeys and once it was set up I’ve never had to tweak it.

    Maybe “x-settings-daemon” will do what you want?

  8. Edward Z. Yang
    Well, I’ve found the display configuration and power management to also be pretty useful, which is why I’ve kept it around. What is “x-settings-daemon”?
  9. Anonymous
    I’m saying that Ubuntu has brought back the media keys plugin. For one, it’s required by Unity. gnome-panel was an example of something which doesn’t work in upstream g-s-d, but does in Ubuntu.
  10. Edward Z. Yang
    Oh, now that is confusing. So is this something like the fix_media_keys_on_unity.patch they’re applying?
  11. Ben Gamari
    I took some time yesterday to add MPRIS and PulseAudio volume support to my XMonad configuration. So far things seem to work well, https://github.com/bgamari/xmonad-config
  12. Anonymous

    Try the trusty version of gnome-settings-daemon. It sounds like it fixes exactly your problem.

    It should be updated in 13.10 soon, too

  13. Edward Z. Yang
    gnome-settings-daemon (3.8.5-0ubuntu12) trusty; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/fix_media_keys_on_unity.patch: Another reworking. Try to
    start the legacy keygrabber all the time. Only don't if we're running
    shell. Should fix keygrabber in environments without panel or Unity.
 -- Iain Lane    Tue, 29 Oct 2013 17:03:35 +0000

    Oh sweet!

  14. Simao
    Anyone managed to fix this without installed those packages??
  15. Thiago Negri
    I don’t know exactly how, but I’m using Arch Linux + Xmonad without spawning anything of gnome-* and my media keys works correctly.
  16. Edward Z. Yang
    Verified that the trusty package gets suspend and all that working. I’ll upload a backport to my PPA shortly.
  17. Arash Rouhani

    I just upgraded to 13.10. However the fn keys are still working for me. It might be because I login with “Xmonad with Gnome” in the login screen.

    Oh, and thanks for this amazing blog! Never stop posting! :)

  18. Arash Rouhani

    Nevermind. I realized it was just gnome-panel making the keys working.

    Tough, I just realized that if you launch gnome-panel and then taffybar (in that order). You’ll be running gnome-panel without the actual panel! :)

  19. Anonymous
    Yep, that’s right: gnome-panel will handle media keys. The taffybar trick is a neat one
  20. eythian

    This no longer seems to work:

    dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of gnome-settings-daemon: gnome-settings-daemon depends on libgnome-desktop-3-4 (>= 3.5.3); however: Package libgnome-desktop-3-4 is not installed.

  21. Edward Z. Yang
    Hey eythian; the new improved workaround is to install a backport from Trusty. I have one in my personal PPA; see the EDIT on the post.
  22. eythian

    Actually, it’s not needed any more. After posting that I discovered that there was a version of gnome-settings in saucy-proposed that fixes it.

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/saucy/+source/gnome-settings-daemon/+bug/1235625

    Hopefully it’ll get released properly soon.

  23. Edward Z. Yang
    Great news; if you could write another comment when it gets released I can update the post again.
  24. LaunchpadJanitor
    Fix released a day after your last comment - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/saucy/+source/gnome-settings-daemon/+bug/1235625
  25. Anonymous
    It seems like Ubuntu vivid breaks media keys again. gnome-panel does not seem to support media keys, the Trusty-backported gnome-settings-daemon now conflicts with gsettings-desktop-schemas, and unity-settings-daemon (suggested by a recent comment in LP bug 1235625) doesn’t seem to handle media keys either. Have you managed to find any workaround?
  26. Anonymous

    After some futzing around, here’s an awkward workaround that gets media keys working (using stock packages from Ubuntu vivid):

    add gnome-settings-daemon to RequiredComponents in xmonad.session after login, run gnome-panel after login, run “unity-settings-daemon –replace”

    It seems that the combination of gnome-panel and unity-settings-daemon are necessary to handle media keys, and furthermore, for some reason adding unity-settings-daemon to RequiredComponents does not properly launch unity-settings-daemon.

  27. Edward Z. Yang
    That is bonkers! Thanks for the note, I’ll have to give it a try. (I really don’t like gnome-panel because there’s no way to get rid of the bottom window bar, but it would be good to know if this method works reliably.)
  28. Martyn Smith

    Wow, I’ve been searching for ages to figure this out (I’m using i3 as a window manager) and yes, running gnome-panel makes everything work.

    It’d be awesome if anyone could figure out how to have it working without splatting gnome headers/footers to the screen :-)

  29. Martyn Smith

    Further update, I’ve worked out (since I run a nested X server for some selenium stuff I do) I can run gnome-panel in there (using DISPLAY=:1 gnome-panel &), then the stupid top/bottom bars are out of sight, and global media keys still works.

    Seriously, that’s very ugly though, hopefully someone can improve on that :-)

  30. Edward Z. Yang
    I suppose that would work! But then how do you get your tray icons?
  31. Martyn Smith

    Oh, i3 has a doofer that renders tray icons for you … I wonder if gnome panel is eating them though, might have to check that tomorrow :-)

    Either way, it’d be nice if I didn’t have to run gnome-panel at all …

  32. Michael J. Sullivan

    Looked into this a bit while I should have been working on something more productive, and it looks like all gnome-panel was doing to cause this to work was requesting the name (whatever that means) “org.gnome.Panel” on the “org.freedesktop.DBus” interface. Of course.

    So I hacked together a script that does that and then goes to sleep: https://gist.github.com/msullivan/d3bca6ed2907ee5d8d16

    I could probably package this up more nicely if that would be useful to people.