Showing posts with label system sounds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label system sounds. Show all posts

Thursday, January 14, 2010

System sounds in Debian

My new installation of Debian came with no system sounds- rather soulless for a modern operating system I thought. I'd expected some Japanese mystical pipe music to match the wonderful image to the left, but I was disappointed.
It's possible to enable Gnome sounds (after installing a sound daemon), but Gnome sounds are pretty naff. The Cleanus Gnome system sounds on debian-art I think suit the distro, and sound much nicer than the Gnome sounds. They use a wood kalimba and a metal xylophone, giving a percussive sound with a wood sustain- quite and discrete, as described.
Here's how to enable system sounds. Install the following and reboot.
esound
libesd-alsa0
gnome-audio
Go to System>Preferences>Sound>Sounds and enable software sound mixing and play system sounds. Another reboot may be necessary here. If the Gnome sounds are not to your taste, download a set of system sounds from debian-art, and follow the instructions to install. (Basically just drop them in the appropriate folder [/usr/share/sounds] with root privileges.)