Alright, it's really a simple problem, but it's annoying me. The volume controls just won't use the master channel.. they always use master mono (which doesn't really do anything for my box).

Here's what I know:

scancodes set correctly
keycodes set correctly
keysyms set correctly
--USING KMIX!!!--
hotkeys are set for master
no hotkeys are set for master mono
BIOS has absolutely zero options for controlling the keys

I have mandriva 2008.0, just installed. I had 2007.0 which did exactly the same thing. I'm using kernel ... 2.6.22.something. Doesn't matter. Any ideas on how to fix this?

So where do you guys think the hotkey is being intercepted?

UPDATE: keys are not recognized by kde anymore... and I have no idea why. Need help!!

Have you set your keyboard layout to reflect HP? If you haven't, first go into Kcontrol and edit the keyboard layout to be "HP Pavillion ZT11XX". This will enable use of the multimedia keys. Then, try the volume controls. If they aren't what you want, I would say open KMix and configure the shortcuts. But, I've never had a problem after setting up the keyboard to reflect the HP layout. Let me know if that helps at all...

The most simple answer is usually the correct one. THANK YOU! Works perfectly... I hadn't had the ZT driver configured... I was using some multimedia thing. Works fine. THANK YOU. SERIOUSLY.

You're welcome!

yep, issue's back. I had run kmix as root, which doesn't have the problem - but I had to reinstall... now running kmix as root has no keys working, while running kmix as my normal user has the keys working for master mono, again. It's got to be a setting in my user profile... but where? what?

Okay, here's what I had to do:

Map the keys in /etc/X11/Xmodmap. Doesn't matter what name I gave them, as long as they're mapped. After I did that everything worked fine.... weird.
Also, using the ZT11XX driver was needed. Now I know at least.

and I restart.. and it's broken again. I give up.

I did it the "hacky" way once.

You can create a .Xmodmap in your /home/username folder with the proper mappings in it. Then, I copied /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc (which is a script) to /home/username/.kde/Autostart (I'm pretty sure that's right!) and edited the script to reflect my /home/username/.Xmodmap file. Restart X. Then, when it runs the Autostart stuff, it will execute the script and use the .Xmodmap from your home folder and make those keys mapped! It's worth a shot!!!

It turns out, KDE was mapping those keys to some crazy hotkey function in the control panel. I have no idea why, but that was overriding all my functions for those keys. I erased the hotkeys for volume in khotkeys... remapped them to kmix's DCOP functions... and then restarted X (PS I already tried the hacky way :P). It now works, and I now know how to make hotkeys in KDE. All is well!!

Great! Glad you're up and running....again! :P