Hiraedd (Marco's blog)

During your journey in the unstable debian land of gnome 2.24/2.26, the bug #516080 can manifest itself. You will have the the sound preferences tab all greyed out (system -> preferences -> sound, sounds tab), the system sounds will not work and anything using libcanberra will not play notification sounds, like e.g. Empathy.

It seems tha libcanberra will not play notification sounds if it has not installed the default sound theme, which is not packaged (yet? See #486559) in Debian due to licensing issues, I suppose.

Here is my little workaround:

1. download the control files needed to build the debian package into the freedesktop dir:

     git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/freedesktop-sound-theme.git \ freedesktop
   

2. download and extract the libcanberra sound files:

     wget http://0pointer.de/public/sound-theme-freedesktop.tar.gz && tar xvzf \ 
     sound-theme-freedesktop.tar.gz
   

3. build the debian package (you may need to install dpkg-dev before)

    cd freedesktop && dpkg-buildpackage
   

4. install the debian packages you got at the end of the process:

    cd .. && dpkg -i freedesktop-sound-theme_0.2-1_amd64.deb
   

Et voila, now you should be able to enable the system sounds, and the Empathy sounds will work