That was pretty much the setup I had on my last laptop (lubuntu), except Audacious. I have now the same on the X1. Pulseaudio gone, ALSA in. As you said, it did not help with the buttons though. I:ll dig into this at a later time. The way it is now is good enough.

Thanks everybody for the ongoing support!

There are two buttons. One to mute and one rocker switch to increase decrease the volume. Prior to ascii, when pressing the Mute button it would just do that and the in-built orange LED came on. When pressing up/down volume it did just that and an overlay came up on the screen showing the bar where the volume level was.

All this functionality is not available any more after the upgrade to ascii. Audio as such works, but I have to change the volume by accessing Pulse Audio or whatever slider a program or website offers.

Thanks for your help.

Well, this confused me even more, when I tried to follow the steps on the page above and install a 4.x kernel, apt complained and told me that my linux-base version would need to be downgraded. So I left that exercise alone and Instead upgraded to ascii, which eventually fixed the problem. I had to bring wlan0 up manually and enter it in the wicd preferences.