Within Opensuse 11 I can control the volume but only if I go into the mixer and select the audio card(just an integrated audio card) control and drag it up or down. The volume buttons on my keyboard do work as it shows the volume go up or down when I press them and it mutes if I press that but they don't control the volume at all, only the audio card within the mixer works. It seems as if the master volume does not control the volume at all.

How can I fix this?

Do you have a windosz keyboard ?

Its just an HP keyboard that came with an HP Pavilion 753n about 5-6 years ago.

This is a long-shot because you haven't told us what your desktop is (KDE, Gnome, Icewm, whatever ?)
In KDE (and maybe others) R-click the speaker icon on your panel
Select Master Channel
Mine has to be set to "Front" but YMMV, so try them all.
Then the volume up /down works fine.

Thanks this worked, and for the record I use KDE 3.5. Weird thing though is that both headphone, and my audio card control the volume, and if one is up and then you slide another up it'll continue to get louder. Seems like the headphone is really the only one that works, if I use the audio card the sound is distorted, I don't really understand why.

Pleased it worked.
Maybe stick that in your profile (at the left, just add KDE).
Audio is audio is ...
If the output from some audio module / hardware is over the signal level of what the receiver was expecting, it'll be distorted.

That's why linux has "mixers" and us old-timers used to worry about the various inputs to our "preamps", and the signal levels they sent to our "Power Amplifiers".

Bottom line: Look at your "Mixer", turn some things down, others up.

You may not achieve total satisfaction for volume normalisation. 40 years ago such was possible, but not many of us had computers then

problem is that if I have the audio card up say 25% just so that the headphone level is nice and loud when I really wanna turn it up for music then if I mute the audio, there will still be noise since only the headphone volume is muted and not the audio card as well.