the PNMixer bug

I’m using awesome (window manager) on my cheap Asus VivoBook W202 that breezes along on Arch Linux.

The simplest and most effective tray icon that I can find to show the master volume status is pnmixer. $ pnmixer puts a volume icon in the right end of awesome’s wibox. Then, a right-click on that icon for

Preferences >
  Behaviour > Volume Control Command > pavucontrol
  View > Draw Volume Meter on Tray Icon

$ pavucontrol (PulseAudio Volume Control 5.0) opens a sound mixer, and it’s through that mixer that PNMixer silently does it’s magic of showing and controlling the volume.

Except when it doesn’t, as is the case in my awesome configuration.

Apparently it’s a known bug, and there’s no developer willing to take it on…

pactl to the rescue

On Arch, libpulse provides the pactl command (pactl(1)):

NAME: pactl - Control a running PulseAudio sound server

- it can finely control the volume, and, happily, PNMixer sees the changes and shows them in the icon.

So my workaround is awesome / audio which I symlink to ~/.config/awesome/audio/, and then my rc.lua configures XF86AudioMute, XF86AudioLowerVolume, and XF86AudioRaiseVolume (the keyboard’s volume keystrokes) to access the little Bash scripts therein.

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