HowTo/LiveWithoutSoundcard

Dont have a (working) soundcard but need a few signals, like a beep when a message arrives in your jabber client, a highlight in your irc client or when email arrives?

In Debian, get apt-get install beep. In other Linux distributions or other OSes, install beep manually.

Then you can make a shell script, for example in bash, create a new text file beep.sh with any text editor like vi or joe.


 * 1) /bin/bash

beep -f 523 -l 300 beep -f 10000 -l 500 beep -f 880 -l 1000 ...

-f is the frequency of the tone in Hertz -l is the duration of the tone in millisecond

check out details on man beep.

Play with the options, you could even compose your own music with this ;)

When finished you make the beep.sh executable through:

chmod +x beep.sh

and finally you can enter something like

/home/yourname/beep.sh

as the player command in the settings of your Psi jabber client or according application that allows setting a custom player command on incoming events.

Links
Beep for [[Linux] and Windows]

Manual for beep (man beep)