I recently had a problem on my HP Pavillion DV4 laptop, where the multimedia buttons and the wifi button stopped working.
I was unable to change the sound volume using the multimedia panel, nor could I enable my wifi/bluetooth.
I came to the conclusion that it must be an ACPI problem, so I attempted to roll back to an older Fedora 12 kernel, which didn’t help at all. I also tried check the gnome keyboard shortcut preferences. They seemed correct and were set to XF<blah> events.
Restarting the acpi service didn’t help either. From what I could tell looking in the logs, no events were being recorded when the multimedia buttons were pressed. However, strangely the function buttons worked. I.E Function+F7 or F8 would increase or decrease the screen brightness and generate a keyboard event.
I then tried to boot the Ubuntu Karmic Koala live cd and found the exact same problem appears in Ubuntu. So therefore it wasn’t a distribution specific issue as it affected both Ubuntu and Fedora.
My solution was to shut down the laptop, disconnect the mains power adaptor, remove the battery, reattach the battery and boot the laptop up. It seems that pulling the battery out fixed the problem!
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