During my holiday brake visiting family I have been assisting my brother with updating his laptop to Debian Squeeze/testing. When he was running Lenny/stable we loaded KeyTouch to get the multimedia valume controles on his keyboard to register in XFCE. With Squeeze/testing this was not working. However, I can set the audio controls in XFCE’s Keyboard application found in settings. I clicked on the Applications Shortcuts and clicked the Add Button. Here I imputed the following commands and after clicking OK was prompted to press the proper key (e.g. slide the volume control dial up or down).

increase volume:

amixer set Master 5+

decrease volume:

amixer set Master 5-

mute and unmute:

amixer set Master toggle