About once an hour my machine, running OpenSuSE 11.1, makes a chime sound. Since there are many programs installed by default, I have no idea where it’s coming from. Is there any way to determine that and get rid of it?
> About once an hour my machine, running OpenSuSE 11.1, makes a chime
> sound. Since there are many programs installed by default, I have no
> idea where it’s coming from. Is there any way to determine that and get
> rid of it?
Do you have polling set up in your email? Maybe it is checking and alerting
you to the presence of new mail?
I looked at my kmail notifications, and no sound is associated with receiving email. But as a second check I played the default sound for receiving email, and it is a different sound than the one I hear (which is a 4-note sequence).
My machine chimes when I am not there and the screen is blank. However, I have been close by and sometimes it is the updater and once it said the screen was locked, but it wasn’t.
Regards
Since questions are never stupid:
Are you using a screen saver ?
If you’re running KDE, what happens if you turn of all sounds?
Are any of the configured sounds related to power management ?
It looks like just some notification.
Out of curiosity what is the system updater check interval set to?
I also get this chime from time to time and I haven’t spent any time
trying to track it down.
I decided to go at this backwards and played every sound in /opt/kde3/share/sounds, hoping that if I spot the sound file I can search for the program that invokes it. The chime I hear is not any of them!
I believe that the chime I’m hearing comes from the file /usr/share/sounds/KDE-Sys-App-Negative. But what sort of program might be using that file?
pwabrahams wrote:
> But what sort of program might be using that file?
since no one else (that i’ve seen) has ever described an annoying,
about once an hour chime:
-
a program not in the default install of openSUSE if it default
installs to chime -
a program not often user installed if it default installs to
chime hourly -
a program not often user adjusted from the default silent, to
chime hourly
now, if you were to open top in a virtual terminal, visible on the
desktop and noticed what active when you heard the chime, then . . .
and/or, if you installed atop, set it to take a snapshot every minute,
note the system time the next chime you hear, search the atop file for
the culprit becoming more active around the chime time, then . . .
–
platinum
Using top as you suggested, it appears that knotify4 is the likely villain. But what is knotify4? It doesn’t seem to have a manpage, and Google doesn’t return any obviously useful results for it. I certainly never invited it into the house. What would be the consequences of killing it?
I did notice a number of reported bugs pertaining to knotify4.
you may have made progress!
first: killing knotify4 will most likely (i’m guessing) kill KDE (from
google it seems to be one of the basic/primary ‘things’ in the foundation)
try this: open Personal Settings/Configure Desktop > Sound &
Multimedia > System Bell > and then left click the “Test” button…is
that the “chime” you have been hearing about once an hour?
if so, then we know KDE is trying to tell you something…
then, if you switch from “System Bell” to “System Notifications” you
can learn all of the different things KDE might be trying to tell
you…you can flip the selector at the top through the various
applications, then look at the events and any with a sound icon next
to it, if you click on it you will see in the “Actions Play a Sound”
blank the name of the .wav file associated with THAT event…just
keep looking until you find one listing “KDE-Sys-App-Negative” (if
that is in fact the one you are hearing…
if successful, you should then know what you are being told each hour,
and by what application…
once you know that you should be able to either silence the sound (if
you don’t want to know about it) or whatever…
good luck…let us know how you get on with it…
–
platinum
Give a hacker a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach top and you feed him for a lifetime.
Are you using Skype? It’s a known chimer…when contacts log on, log off, change their status etc etc.
The sound for System Bell is turned off. I turned it on and tried Test and got no sound, however.
then, if you switch from “System Bell” to “System Notifications” you
can learn all of the different things KDE might be trying to tell
you…you can flip the selector at the top through the various
applications, then look at the events and any with a sound icon next
to it, if you click on it you will see in the “Actions Play a Sound”
blank the name of the .wav file associated with THAT event…just
keep looking until you find one listing “KDE-Sys-App-Negative” (if
that is in fact the one you are hearing…
KDE-Sys-App-Negative doesn’t seem to be in any of those notifications. The very name of the sound also hints at that.
Would there be any directories that I could usefully do a grep scan on to find references to KDE-Sys-App-Negative?
The file KDE-Sys-App-Negative.ogg is in /usr/share/sounds, not in /opt/kde3/share/sounds where the other notification sounds are.
if your desire is to just stop the sound, and you don’t care to know
which program is trying to tell you what, then just rename the file…
but, if your machine melts or your house burns down, do NOT cry to me…
on the other hand, if you do care, then keep looking, and listening…
i think i’d turn off everything you don’t need, one at a time until
the sound stops…begin with all those things YOU added since
initial install…
here try this, put this in a terminal:
ps -e >> ~/Desktop/ps-eOUT.txt
then copy/past the output, found in that file on the desktop, back to
here and someone (maybe) will help you decide what to shut down first
through last…[it won’t be me tonight, bed time here]
–
platinum
Note: Accuracy, completeness, legality, or usefulness of this posting
may be illusive.
I renamed the file KDE-Sys-App-Negative to something else, and not surprisingly haven’t heard the chime since. If that’s causing a problem, I don’t know of it. Come to think of it, if the chime was trying to tell me something but I didn’t know what it was trying to tell me, I’m no worse off now than I was before.