Comments on: System Beep

By: pphaneuf

pphaneuf — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:44:24 +0000

I’d rather have it that they made it as baffling as Mac OS X. But then, they don’t have a separate “PC speaker”, they just have built-in speakers for their sound card, so you wouldn’t get the exact same functionality. It’s much less confusing, though.

By: Ian Lance Taylor

Ian Lance Taylor — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:33:41 +0000

antgreen: I just checked another system–not newly installed, but upgraded–and it doesn’t have “Beep” under “Select tracks to be visible.” In fact, it has a completely different set of choices in general. So it presumably has something to do with the specific hardware, no doubt for reasons that make sense to somebody.

Manu: I keep the volume quite low; I don’t think it disturbs other people. The beep on filename completions happens when the filename can not be completed. It’s true that there is other feedback available, but I’m accustomed to typing while I’m looking at a different window, so the audible feedback is helpful for me.

You’re right that the current difficulty is not as bad as missing the pcspkr module. I always attributed that one to some failure in the upgrade process, as I never noticed it in a newly installed system. I should report this, plus I should report that prupgrade is dangerous, that xfs is not serving fonts correctly at startup, that emacs is crashing periodically…..

By: Manu

Manu — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:56:56 +0000

I strongly hate the system beep and cannot find it useful for anything. Why would I want to hear a beep for file completion if I can see the filename being completed. And what about your co-workers, your family, people around you?

That said, you should report as bugs both the mismatch of volume mixers and the low discoverability of volume controls. As you say, it doesn’t only affect the beep but other controls like â€œMasterâ€, â€œPCMâ€, and â€œMicrophoneâ€. Nonetheless, touching some settings in the volume mixer seems far more intuitive than discovering how to force a modprobe of a particular module. Of course, it is always easier to solve a problem if you know the answer. It doesn’t have anything to do with being a long-time user of computer systems.

I find this funny because long ago I complained how difficult was to disable completely the system beep in KDE-Ubuntu. I haven’t checked whether now it is difficult to re-enable it. I guess it shouldn’t be, since KDE does not typically remove features for no reason as opposed to other well-known desktops.

By: antgreen

antgreen — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:20:07 +0000

I’m using F9. The system beep has always worked for me (in emacs and otherwise), and I don’t have a “Beep” listed under “Select tracks to be visibleâ€. I have no idea why our systems are different.

By: Ian Lance Taylor

Ian Lance Taylor — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:42:58 +0000

fche: I would hope that they would pay attention to your bug reports.

davem: yeah, it’s a real issue. I try to be flexible on things like window appearance and placement, but I do like my system beep.

By: davem

davem — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:29:13 +0000

If you’re going to use the default Fedora desktop, you’ll simply have
to get used to having your favorite defaults change.

At the first stage, like this case, you’ll spend a good half hour finding out
where to get things back to how you liked them.

At the second stage, the setting will later become completely unsettable,
so you can’t even revert back to the behavior you like.

It’s a sad state of affairs, but I personally lack the energy to fight this trend
and just use different desktop software such as XFCE4 when it bothers
me enough.

By: fche

fche — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:25:39 +0000

Argh. This misfeature ticked me off badly, making me wonder whether I had imagined ^G noises all that time. Now I work around it with xkbevd, tying it at the X level to PCM sounds.