playing sounds at startup

Janina Sajka janina at rednote.net
Wed Jun 2 10:43:13 EDT 2004


Hi, Steve:

Yes, yes. This is important even if you do have a hardware synth for those of using laptops. Sometimes, you don't want to hook it up.

1.)	You can add something like:

aplay /boot/boot.wav

to your /etc/rc.local (or your distro's equivalent). That's what I do. And, using a generic sort of location like /boot/boot.wav lets you decide at any time that you want to change the sound you hear by simply copying a different .wav into that location.

2.)	I put 'aplay /boot/login.wav' and 'aplay /boot/logout.wav' into my .bash_profile and my .bash_logout. Perhaps a bit less useful, but these help me know about successful login/logout when speech isn't available.

3.)	Under the 2.6 kernels, be sure you've goot the beep working. On Fedora at least it's off by default. The best mechanism we've found so far to make sure it's always available is to add the pcspkr driver to your initrd. Of course, you can also modprobe for it -- but that's not helpful during boot! <grin>

Stephen Clower writes:
> Hello folks,
>   A while back, I recall someone mentioning a way to cause Linux to play various sounds at different times such as at the login prompt and at shutdown. Since I mostly use software speech to access Linux, I don't have access until the login prompt, so it'd be nice to know when my machine is displaying it. If someone could send me that information again I'd appreciate it.
> Thanks,
> Steve
> 
> Stephen Clower, that guy from the south.




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