Bug 503360 (bsund)

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 11 development cycle.
Changing version to '11'.

More information and reason for this action is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping

From my perspective:

1. there should be no sound on the gdm screen - some people don't like system sounds, so they should not be forced to have them on gdm too.

2. there should be an easy way to change gdm settings - there is no such way at the moment.

Workaround:

1. Use gconf-editor to disable
apps/gdm/simple-greeter/setting-manager-plugins/sound
2. # rm -rf /var/lib/gdm/.gconf/
3. # cp -r /root/.gconf /var/lib/gdm/.
4. # chown -R gdm:gdm /var/lib/gdm/.gconf
5. # gnome-volume-control
6. Set 'Sound Theme' to 'No sounds'
7. Close gnome-volume-control
8. Re-logon
9. Enjoy reclaimed silence :)

Editorial Comment: 

This is a very annoying problem.

I looked through many of the bug reports and Google results for gdm and it looks like gdm is in a mess.  The pulseaudio in F11 is much better.  Hopefully gdm will be healed before F12 gets here.  After trying all the fixes in the previous comments I ended up stuffing cotton into the speaker connected to my motherboard.  Somehow trying the above fixes moved the demon sprite from the sound system to the bios driven speaker. That fix worked for me but adjusting the cotton stuffing so I could barely hear the beep from the bios on boot-up was a bit time consuming.

I usually try to be helpful when I run into a bug, but this time I just wanted to stop the distracting beep that often arrived a second or two into typing my password. That is lunacy.  A beep if I type it wrong is acceptable, my bad, but while I typing???

Please excuse this minor frustration.

try to blacklist pcspkr module, just add to your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist the following line:

blacklist pcspkr

(for me personally pcspkr is very annoying, especially on laptop computeres, where speaker is quite close to your ear...)

This is a very serious problem.  GDM should have sound disabled by default.  In fact, I can't see any value in having GDM do any sounds at all, but there are many times where having sounds enabled in quiet places can cause real problems.  Can we at least remove /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/bell.ogg in Fedora?  It's a really easy fix, and I can't think of any drawbacks to doing this.

I tried both of the following, which the GNOME documentation implies should work:

gconftool-2 --direct \
  --config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults -t bool \
  -s /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/settings-manager-plugins/sound/active false

I also tried it for gconf.xml.system and gconf.xml.mandatory, and still had no luck.

By the way, this is still present in Fedora 12 Beta, so it would be great if the version were updated to Rawhide.  Thanks.

It looks like the file was renamed to /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/bell.oga in Fedora 12.  Removing this works around the problem.

Hmm, a few days later and the annoying sounds seem to have come back even though the bell.oga file still doesn't exist.  Weird.

If you do not have success by setting this via gconf, as e.g. the original poster has, don't forget to 

$ chcon -R -t  xdm_var_lib_t /var/lib/gdm/.gconf/

and if you like

% chcon -R -u system_u /var/lib/gdm/.gconf/

if SELinux is enabled.

A reason why this bug may be difficult to reproduce is that if you turn down the volume or mute, the system keeps this setting upon reboot and gdm then is silent.

Btw, this solves also Bug 509505, which essentially is a duplicate. I guess 468432 is also a duplicate.

Note: There really should be a way to turn of sounds easily in gdm (such a simple click to mute). Anyway, I think those who find sounds annoying suffer more than those win who do a big hurray for every beep their lovely machine does. (Anyway this login beep is embarrassing: On my machine it takes about one second between user selection and beep.)

Ok. Doing the stuff in Comment #9 did no longer work after restart... What I did  now is uninstalling gdm, removing any file that looked as if related to gdm and reinstalling (gdm-2.26.1-13.fc11.x86_64). Now for the last couple of restarts anything is silent although the gconf defaults apply, which have sound enabled.

What is the rationale for having this sound in the first place? I've just selected my username and hit enter, and gdm will now ask for my password -- I don't see how the sound has helped me at this point.

As I understand it, a beep might be used to indicate that something unusual has happened (an error requiring some kind of user input), or possibly that a time-intensive operation has completed to notify me that I can now come back and finish something I started doing. I believe that neither of these cases apply here.

One problem for me is that I have my PC connected to a stereo with the volume set quite high, which is fine for the music I listen to (with the volume set low in the player, so I can turn it up if I ever need to without having to walk to my stereo) but not when I restart my computer and forget about the gdm sound while people are trying to sleep in the next room.

I tried another workaround: set ACL privileges for user and group gdm to 000 for /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/bell.oga and disabled sound plugin for gdm in /var/lib/gdm/.gconf/apps/gdm/simple-greeter/settings-manager-plugins/sound/%gconf.xml. Restored proper SELinux fcontext and  - sound is disabled for me.

BTW. Please bump the version to F12.
And .. dear package maintainer and/or developers (perhaps upstream ones). Please rethink technical superiority of rewritten configuration of gdm versus user friendliness and usability.

Create the clearer and simpler method than sniffing what sound file is used then denying reading it and/or copying by hand schema settings to the gdm user configs.
It should considerably improve this part of user desktop experience.

Regards
Marcin

My current best workaround is:

/usr/bin/gconftool-2 --direct \
    --config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults \
    -t bool -s /desktop/gnome/sound/event_sounds false

But yeah, gdm really seems to be broken and unmaintained.

I think it's unacceptable that this bug has not found any attention by the maintainers so far. I got rid of the just-curious-you-hit-the-enter-key-beep but still have it if I mistype my password, cf. Bug 509505. This makes FC almost unusable for me. Why is there no possibility to configure gdm? (Why the heck does it use gconf, although it is not part of any desktop?)

Yes, this is no discussion forum, but if the maintainers are not interested, just put the WONTFIX flag. Then it would maybe worth the effort to try to get xdm running. It's really annoying to see such a simple bug to remain unfixed without even a proper workaround. (Even worse, it is a bug from which you more or less _have_ to suffer every time you turn on your machine.)

Note sounds are very important for a certain class of users (in particular those with accessibility needs).

comment 13 is fine.

You can also point it directly at /var/lib/gdm/.gconf instead of /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults

Another option is to run gconf-editor (as root), check the toggle box next to event_sounds off, right click on it and choose "Set as Default"

Some other relevent gconf keys are discussed in the gdm manual:

http://projects.gnome.org/gdm/docs/2.24/

In the F-13 cycle we're going to add a "User account" dialog that will allow certain login settings to be configured.  I don't know if sounds will be one of them.  It may make more sense for that to be done via a "Make Default" button in gnome-volume-control like how we configure background for the login screen in gnome-appearance-properties.

Note GDM is not unmaintained.  It's just certain issues are prioritized over other issues.

(In reply to comment #15)
> Note sounds are very important for a certain class of users (in particular
> those with accessibility needs).

This is true in general, but I'm not sure how much good this specific sound event is or how helpful it is to have turned on by default.

The behaviour of a freshly installed system is this:
1) Show user account chooser, which will have just one account (the one made in firstboot)
2) The user selects this one account
3) gdm beeps (sometimes very loudly)
4) The user enters their password (again, set up at firstboot)

For users who are visually impaired, there is no sound indication that they have arrived at the login screen in the first place. So let's suppose they wait until they are sure the login screen is ready, and they press enter to select the user and can hear the beep, and they can then enter their password. As I said in comment 11, this sound on pressing enter is really not that helpful -- you already know you're about to enter your password, visually impaired or not.

Now, in a more realistic scenario, a visually impaired user would have a screen reader and/or other accessibility features turned on and configured. In this case if they are configuring things couldn't they choose to turn on sounds on the login screen etc while they are doing that?

There are other issues with the sound too. For example, if the system last had the volume set to mute, there will be no login sound (which certainly does no good for accessibility). And as other people have mentioned, if the volume is set high, the sound can be deafening.

Okay, the emphasis on the accessbility issue might be subject to internal Fedora politics... But also note that unexpected sounds at uncontrolled loudness can cause serious damage to a healthy ear. And yes, there seem to be more serious bugs in gdm, I agree. Nevertheless, google shows already the first requests how to turn off sounds in F-12.

So I'm looking forward to have F-13. Meanwhile I installed the Simple Login Manager (SLiM). There everything is silent -- and remains silent forever, because with SLiM there is no way to start pulseaudio and also no webcam is available (this happens because some magic login actions are implemented in gdm rather than the desktop startup). So I gracefully went back to gdm (2.26.1-13.fc11). Now everything is silent, even on wrong password -- I don't get it why, but I am happy and will come back to comment 13 if the sounds appear again.

This sound is really annoying. It plays always at full volume. Somebody should set silent login to default.

For me the the gconf-editor solution from #15 worked. Please make this easier or with different defaults, at least for the gdm user.

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I just checked the latest GDM documentation:

http://library.gnome.org/admin/gdm/2.32/gdm.html

There still appears to be know way to properly configure the dang thing.

Well, this documentation is more than 1 year old... I did not find any configuration tool for gdm in F14, so I guess the bug is still unresolved? It was argued before, that makeing a noise at each boot is a feature and not a bug, so what about a WONTFIX? It would be more honest.

In Fedora 15, the gconftool-2 hack doesn't seem to work.  Several years after the GDM rewrite, there still does not to be any way to configure it.  As far as I can tell, GDM is not actively maintained.

The configuration has been moved to gsettings in f15.

The gsettings man page does not seem to give any insight about how to change system-wide configuration (presumably in /etc/dconf/db/gdm ?) and does not provide any examples.

The ready sound has started for me after installing F15, I haven't found a way to disable it yet.

This is far more complicated than it has to be, but you can convince gsettings to create a modified dconf override. Hopefully I don't have any typos:

cp /etc/dconf/db/gdm gdm.bak
mkdir -p xdg-config/dconf
cp gdm.bak xdg-config/dconf/user
export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$PWD/xdg-config
eval $(dbus-launch --sh-syntax)
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.sound event-sounds false
kill $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID
unset XDG_CONFIG_HOME
sudo cp xdg-config/dconf/user /etc/dconf/db/gdm

(In reply to comment #27)
> cp /etc/dconf/db/gdm gdm.bak
> mkdir -p xdg-config/dconf
> cp gdm.bak xdg-config/dconf/user
> export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$PWD/xdg-config
> eval $(dbus-launch --sh-syntax)
> gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.sound event-sounds false
> kill $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID
> unset XDG_CONFIG_HOME
> sudo cp xdg-config/dconf/user /etc/dconf/db/gdm

Ouch.  I hope there's a better way than that.

In the meantime, I've started using kdm, which actually provides a reasonable mechanism for configuration.

(In reply to comment #27)
Thanks, Dave V., that works for me.
Your dconf-fu is very strong!

This may be a little simpler.

su - 
su - gdm -s /bin/bash
eval $(dbus-launch --sh-syntax)
GSETTINGS_BACKEND=dconf gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.sound event-sounds false
exit
exit

The prompts are omitted so commands fits on one line.

This worked for me.

See above....

Well the false should be on same line as events-sound. Dang I thought I had that covered.

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GDM is still unconfigurable in Fedora 17, so this shouldn't have been automatically closed.

Hm. A `bug' which simply requires to set a flag from true to false and which hasn't been resolved since more than 3 years, should be closed as WONTFIX. Maybe one could open a new bug, that gdm cannot be configured by any reaonsable means (i.e., by editing a text file... just kidding...)

Actually it got way better meanwhile since now the sound only occurs if you mistype your password. And note, that the original bug report is resolved since long ago.

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