Comments on: Hacking sound themes in Karmic

By: ScoBe

ScoBe — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 06:20:33 +0000

Thanks for the page, Adam.

I think that in the case you want to provide a custom theme for all users, Ryan’s first suggestion is probably the best: make the changes in the /usr/local tree. In this case that means in /usr/local/share/sounds/ Generally, mucking about in the /usr/ tree is not a good idea from a system administration perspective, since it can complicate the business of package replacement and later upgrading.

I did this:

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/sounds/scots/stereo
cd /usr/local/share/sounds/scots/stereo
sudo ln -s /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/* .
cd ..
sudo cp /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/index.theme .
sudo nano index.theme
cd stereo
ls

That shows the sounds in your new copied theme. Replace the links with identically named files, or delete them as you wish. I did the following to ‘remove’ the login/logout sounds:

sudo mv service-login.ogg service-login-disabled
sudo mv service-logout.ogg service-logout-disbled

By: Adam Stovicek

Adam Stovicek — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:12:58 +0000

@charrion
I can’t get those events to sound, either. It would be nice if they did, but I noticed there are other events that don’t work either. I’ll keep digging around on that.

@Ryan Hayle
Although my steps involve files located in the /usr directory, I haven’t told anyone to modify any existing files. If you noticed, the first step was to copy a set of files to a new directory in which to modify while preserving the originals.

I do appreciate you pointing out an alternative location for sound themes. It was an area of freedesktop.org’s documentation that I overlooked. However, that location would force any new sound files to remain localized to that one user rather than being accessible system-wide. While most users are using single-user installations, there are some, including myself, who have computers with more than one user account. It would be nice to have one set of files rather than going through the task of duplicating them for every user.

By: Ryan Hayle

Ryan Hayle — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 07:17:06 +0000

Ugh, please do NOT tell users to do stupid things like modifying files in /usr other than in /usr/local!

Sound themes belong in ~/.local/share/sounds/

You can also create a custom theme here named __custom and simply symlink to the audio files you wish to use.

By: charrion

charrion — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 02:38:55 +0000

Is there any other step required to get some of the sound events working? I’ve followed the information in the freedesktop.org tip and placed files in the required location for the events device-added and device-removed (I’d like a sound to indicate when a USB device is connected and disconnected). They are both ogg files.

However, no sound plays when USB devices are connected or removed. Unfortunately my linux-fu is a little weak so I’m not even sure how to check whether the event is recorded by libcanberra or not.

Any help anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated.

By: Adam Stovicek

Adam Stovicek — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:25:34 +0000

@Hi
… for now. It’s a new design/feature that doesn’t (as far as I know) have a simple GUI counterpart like before. It takes a bit of time and can seem tedious, but it does work. Every time I log in now I’m greeted by the familiar roaring sound of a lion.

By: Hi

Hi — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:11:33 +0000

PS: Thanks for the freedesktop.org tip!

By: Hi

Hi — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:10:42 +0000

That’s the only thing we can do… :(

By: Kenneth

Kenneth — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:26:09 +0000

Excelent hack!

Thank you very much for your help.