[xubuntu-users] left Alt key not working in xubuntu 16.04 (mapped to some GUI volume control instead)

[Richard Fromm]

While I appreciate your prompt response (and apologize for my severely delayed response to it), it was far more full of snark than helpful advice. Do you honestly think I don't know how to use a search engine? I've spent several hours searching for this issue, reading pages, following links, etc. No, "xfce shortcuts" does *not* lead to the desired information.
The problem isn't figuring out how to map some sequence of keystrokes using the Alt key. The problem is that pressing the left Alt key is *also* causing an unintended keycode, and I can't figure out how to either (a) make that not happen, or (b) disable the consequences of that unintended keycode.
The tl;dr is that it's a hardware problem, but a software problem in the way in manifests itself. And that I've decided to work around it by using a different keyboard.
Here is a somewhat longer answer for reference by any future readers.
Through various means (e.g. xev, evtest) I could see that pressing the left Alt key also causes a volume down press. I also discovered through these means that the right Alt key also causes a keypad equal press. The extraneous right press doesn't have any discernible effect. The extraneous left press, however, does. It's getting grabbed by some widget that turns down the volume. And I can't figure out how to get it to not do that.
At first I thought this might be a problem of mapping to the wrong keyboard, but after a bit of experimentation I concluded that that's probably not what's going on. I also discovered that these extraneous key presses are not isolated to either this physical system (the computer, that is), or this OS. They happen on a different machine with KDE. The difference is that with the KDE volume control, it doesn't fully grab control, and the left Alt key is still seen by other programs relying on it. But with Xfce, the volume control prevents any other app from even seeing the left Alt key press.
This is an older box, and one of the reasons I switched from KDE to Xfce when upgrading from 12.04 to 16.04 was that I wanted something less resource intensive. I suppose I could end up spending more time trying to disable the volume control altogether, or experimenting with other lightweight window managers, but I've already spent way too much time on this issue. It kind of feels like giving up just swapping for a different keyboard, but it's a good enough solution for me. (Even more so b/c I was able to get it covered under warranty -- not for the keyboard originally causing this issue, but for a different keyboard that had other more serious problems that I had given up on, but it turns out it had a much longer warranty than I had realized.)




   
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