Fedora – How to get keycode and make multimedia keys usable

Once xbindkeys is installed, open up a terminal and type xbindkeys -k. This should open a white window (don't bother with it). Just press the button you want to create a rule for on your keyboard.

Below, I pressed the 'Volume Up' button on my keyboard

max@max-desktop:/dev> xbindkeys -k
Press combination of keys or/and click under the window.
You can use one of the two lines after "NoCommand"
in $HOME/.xbindkeysrc to bind a key.
"(Scheme function)"
    m:0x10 + c:123
    Mod2 + XF86AudioRaiseVolume
max@max-desktop:/dev> 

Now take the key definition:

"(Scheme function)"
    m:0x10 + c:123
    Mod2 + XF86AudioRaiseVolume

and place it in ~/.xbindkeysrc. Then change the ("Scheme function") part to whatever command you want to be run.

For example, this would laumch VLC when I pressed the Volume Up button:

"vlc"
    m:0x10 + c:123
    Mod2 + XF86AudioRaiseVolume

My guess is that, when you run startx, you don't have an active ConsoleKit session. See e.g. Set up PolicyKit permissions in the Arch Linux wiki entry for NetworkManager. It shows you how to use ck-launch-session in your ~/.xinitrc to make sure you have a proper CK session.

You also need to make sure that PolicyKit permissions are right, although they're probably already fine if things work from inside a Gnome session.

If the command ck-list-sessions shows a difference between using runlevel5.target versus runlevel3.target+startx, then this is probably your issue.

See also:

Administration and Privilege at the bottom of the Network Manager Configuration page.

I don't recommend that you follow what these say without understanding what they're doing, since it's not necessarily clear how they relate to Fedora, but they might be useful reading:

This Ubuntu bug: If 'startx' is run from within a text console, ConsoleKit session is not marked 'active'

This Debian mailing list post that has some details about changing policykit/consolekit permissions: Re: What is the right way to use consolekit with startx?