ubuntu-audio-dev team mailing list archive

[David Henningsson <david.henningsson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

Hopefully I'm sending this to the relevant people, let me know otherwise 
(or just forward to those).

I'm trying to track down the lack of startup sounds in 11.10 and 12.04.
I've written a summary in 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+bug/927459/comments/4

I'll give you some more technical details here:

1) There is no system-ready sound (the drums). This is because lightdm 
never triggers one, like gdm does. In detail:
gnome-session-canberra provides 
/usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/libcanberra-ready-sound.desktop, 
with contains a call to "canberra-gtk-play". Using libcanberra is the 
recommended way to play event sounds. I was talking a bit to Conor about 
synchronising the sound with something visual happening, and my 
suggestion is: just try calling canberra-gtk-play. Should this be too 
slow (since PulseAudio starts/autospawns) at that point, one could 
consider autospawning PulseAudio earlier. You can autospawn pulseaudio 
by e g calling "pactl stat".

2) There is no session-login sound (the longer notes jungle like sound). 
This is because it is disabled, by this [1] patch in libcanberra, by 
Jeremy Bicha. There seems to be no reference to any discussion about it, 
just a statement saying "Disable the login sound by default, since it 
seems to be more disruptive than helpful especially with faster boots".

Both of these missing sounds cause problems for blind users, as voiced 
on an internal Canonical mailinglist (warthogs) recently.

In essence; my point is to get a decision that reviving these sounds is 
what we actually want, and if so, get the people who are responsible to 
actually make that happen.

--
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
http://launchpad.net/~diwic

[1] 
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/precise/libcanberra/precise/view/head:/debian/patches/02_disable_login_sound.patch