Equars People - freedesktop-sound-theme Changestag:people.equars.com,2010:/2009/5/5/freedesktop-sound-theme/changesMephisto Drax2009-05-05T12:16:57Zmarcotag:people.equars.com,2009-05-05:201:12009-05-05T12:16:57Zfreedesktop-sound-theme<p>During your journey in the unstable debian land of gnome, the bug <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=516080">#516080</a> 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 <a href="http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/libcanberra/">libcanberra</a> will not play notification sounds, like e.g. <a href="http://live.gnome.org/Empathy">Empathy</a>.
It seems tha libcanberra will not play notification sounds if it has not installed the default sound theme, which is not packaged (yet? See <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=486559">#486559</a>) in Debian due to licensing issues, I suppose.</p>
<p>Here is my little workaround:</p>
<ol>
<li>download the control files needed to build the debian package:
git clone git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/freedesktop-sound-theme.git freedesktop</li>
<li>download the libcanberra sound files:
wget http://0pointer.de/public/sound-theme-freedesktop.tar.gz
tar xvzf sound-theme-freedesktop.tar.gz</li>
<li>build the debian package (you may need to install dpkg-dev before)
cd freedesktop && dpkg-buildpackage</li>
<li>install the debian packages you got at the end of the process:
dpkg -i freedesktop-sound-theme<em>0.2-1</em>amd64.deb</li>
</ol>
<p>Et voila, now you should be able to enable the system sounds, and the Empathy sounds will work.</p>