Enabling the system beep / bell

[rifter]

I have noticed that I have no kind of system beep or bell at all, or don't seem to. As a matter of fact the default Mageia setup seems to be the most sparse I have seen in terms of sounds for system events, and I have not seen any way to change that. I can live with that but I particularly need beeps in xterm and other terminal programs as well as irc; as things are none of those makes any sounds. I have sound as normal everywhere else and in pidgin.
One of my annoyances with Ubuntu was that they decided to hate the system bell and strangle it at every layer they could think of. It took major surgery to get it back, and in later versions they actually made that harder. The result would be to have the pc speaker respond to the system bell event. I can live with that, it would be nice, but it would be even nicer if a regular beep through the speakers was the response to teh system bell event.
Any ideas on how to get this functionality?

[doktor5000]

One of my annoyances with Ubuntu was that they decided to hate the system bell and strangle it at every layer they could think of. It took major surgery to get it back, and in later versions they actually made that harder.

The same for Mandriva/Mageia as the clear majority doesn't want the system bell to be enabled by default.

At first you'd need to load the module for the PC speaker, that would be

Code: Select all

modprobe pcspkr

and if you want it to be loaded every time your box boots, add it to /etc/modprobe.preload
Than it would depend on the desktop environment you use, how to enable the audible bell again.

[rifter]

Thank you for your swift reply. I am pretty sure I tried that before since it is part of the fix required. I tried loading the module again but there are clearly other steps involved. I did use xset to change the system bell volume also. The pcspkr setting is for the pc speaker to work, which is better than nothing. What I don't get is that there is another post here that says that someone has a beep so loud their dog is scared of it.

[doktor5000]

Have you tried looking in pavucontrol that system sounds are on a normal volume level? And what desktop environment are you using?

[rifter]

Yes I looked at pavucontrol and it is turned up. That would control the regular system beeps as opposed to the one from xterm or the pc speaker. I would be more than happy to have the regular system beep work and then figure out how to get xterm (or gnome-terminal or konsole) to use that, especially since the pc speaker is separate from the regular ones in terms of muting.
I have been using fvwm but I get no beeps in kde either of any kind. It's really rare to hear any kind of system sound and I haven't really found a way to turn any system sounds on at all, much less change what they are, in kde as provided by mageia.
I did look at systemsettings and there is a setting in Common Appearance and Behaviour -> Application and System Notifications that lets you use the pc speaker instead of the regular sound card to do error beeps. But that doesn't do anything since there are no error beeps at all. When I set that to on anyway, the test didn't even work. I checked it again just now and it seems to beep the pc speaker, probably because the pcspkr module is loaded now. If I do get beeps in xterm with the pc speaker, then at least I will have some kind of beep. It would be better to have the regular system sound as used to be provided by a given desktop environment, but since that is not happening even in gnome-terminal etc I can live with pc speaker beeps from xterm. Getting xchat or kvirc to make any noises would be a lost cause I guess in that situation,but it would be something.

[rifter]

Okay, I have determined that the default for xterm was also changed. Using +vb when invoking it allows it to beep the pc speaker.
I do think there is a big difference between not wanting to beep the pc speaker and not providing *any* error beeps or any way to use them. You would think that there would be a configurable option at least to have system beeps (as in sound files) played for errors. But as the first reply suggests this seems to be the new way of doing things. Years ago kde and gnome allowed all kinds of sounds for different events, like mac and windows do, in addition to the potential pc speaker beep. PC speaker being of course there mainly for programs that don't know how to talk to the sound system.
The Ubuntu approach, which is, I believe, trying to propagate upstream, is purported to be to capture pc speaker events and route them to the sound system somehow so a regular beep can be generated through the speakers. That would be desirable, but so far all they did was disable the pc speaker such that no beeps come from xterm or anything else.
Anyway thanks for the help. This is something I need to do more research in since what I really want in the end is some kind of sound to play for error beeps.