February 2, 2019

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Reuse Old MacBook Air (late 2010) as a Linux Machine (Fixing Volume Control)

Reuse Old MacBook Air (late 2010) as a Linux Machine (Fixing Volume Control)

I tried reusing my old MacBook Air late 2010 (MacBookAir3,1) as it got quite slow running on MacOS X. The distribution I chose is Ubuntu Studio 18.10. Although installation of OS is easy, some points that have to be fixed exist and are covered in this article.

Volume Control Keys do not work

Volume control keys do not work by default. A module named xfce4-volumed seems tp manage the volume keys and it is already set in Autostart. (Refer to the following)

autorun-list-xfce-volume-en
However, since the timing of starting up the module seems wrong, the module does not work. If you try disable auto start and run xfce4-volumed manually, the volume keys should work well.

Setting lazy start-up

A measure to wait a while to run xfce4-volumed after log-in should be made. First, create a script to run xfce4-volumed after 20 seconds pause to the following directory.

$ sudo vi /etc/init.d/delayed-xfce4-volumed
#!/bin/sh
sleep 20
xfce4-volumed

Give appropriate privileges to the created script.

$ sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/delayed-xfce4-volumed

Designate the created script at Settings Manager > Session and Startup > Application Autostart > Add.

delayed-xfce4-volumed-en
The volume control keys should work properly once you log out and log in again.