Re: alert sound

[David Shochat <shochat acm org>]

Suresh Krishnan (LMC) wrote:
> Hi David,
>   Have you checked your ~/.inputrc for any "set bell-style " statements? If you have it set to "set bell-style none" you will not hear the beeps.
I had run into this possibility when I was first trying to solve this. I actually had no .inputrc, so I created one and it now contains:
 set bell-style audible

but this had no effect.

... and Owen Taylor wrote:
> Well, you can check pretty easily if it's GNOME terminal ... just run
> xterm and try it there (even easier than echo -e "\a" is just to hit
> Control-G when inside bash)
Ok, tried that. Has no effect.

> You might want to check your X bell settings directly with 'xset q';
> you can see Bell percent/pitch/duration.
$ xset q
Keyboard Control:
...
 bell percent:  50    bell pitch:  400    bell duration:  100

> If those are set to something reasonable, then it's most likely 
> a hardware problem. (Are the leads to your PC speaker connected?

I searched thoroughly and I see no evidence of any PC speaker (Gateway cost-cutting?). I do have audio working (sound card, etc.) Since the kernel obviously knows I have an audio device, why would it (or maybe the X server) bother looking for a PC speaker anyway?

> Does it work in a virtual console?)
No

Anyway, thank you all for your help. I now realize that this issue has nothing to do with GNOME. I had originally assumed that it was up to gnome-terminal to decide how to implement the beep, which is why I asked here.