richter

Note: this post is in regards to Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft).

Maybe Kubuntu doesn’t do this, but I’m using Gnome and everytime I boot up my laptop it makes this obnoxious drumroll sound when it asks for my login info. I’ve changed the settings in Gnome to not play any sounds, but it doesn’t apply to this sound for some reason. After much Googling and investigating, I found a quick and dirty way to eliminate the sound.

Here’s the location of the file:

/usr/share/sounds/question.wav

I wanted to make sure that any changes I made could be easily undone since fixing problems in Linux is never an easy task. I also wanted the file to still be available, so my computer wouldn’t lock up if it assumed the file would be there. To do this, I made a backup and removed the sound data with these commands:

cd /usr/share/sounds
mv question.wav question.bak.wav
touch question.wav


Note: you must be logged in as root to run these commands, or prefix sudo to each command (ubuntu is strange, yes).

Hope this helps somebody, but it’s mostly to vent my own frustration with software that insists it knows better than its user.