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Recently I installed ubuntu 13.04 on my Lenovo T430.

The mute button on the laptop has an LED to indicate whether the sound is muted (LED on) or not (LED off). Ubuntu's software mute does not always match up with the state of the hardware mute.

The OS mute function does not change the state of the hardware mute. If the hardware mute is on, no sound. No matter what my settings in the OS are.

The hardware mute button does change the state of OS mute, but because the OS mute does not change the hardware state, they can be mismatched.

Is there any way to sync the two so the both reflect reality? Not sure if this is a driver or firmware problem. Perhaps it's just a feature that Ubuntu doesn't support.

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Possible duplicate over on askubuntu: askubuntu.com/questions/125367/… –  ernie Sep 17 '13 at 21:29
@ernie In that question the user's hardware button presses weren't being recognized at all. As I said in the question, the button press is recognized in ubuntu, but the state in the OS is out of sync. –  Moses Sep 17 '13 at 21:30
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up vote 1 down vote accepted

This problem is well known by ubuntu. There are different laptop-manufacturer affected. Also the Lenovo T530 is shown there. Not exactly your model, but the same productline.

There is a bug-report but it's not solved yet.

I would suggest you, to try a possible solution from the askubuntu-QA because it looks like, it will possible solve your problem:

  1. Start alsamixer in the terminal.






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+1 for finding the bug report, I hadn't seen that. Unfortunately, my sound card does not have a Mute-LED option, similar to the posts in comments. But alas, a bug is a bug, I'll just have to wait on it being fixed. –  Moses Oct 11 '13 at 17:39
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