[Jaunty] Sound in GTK apps can't be disabled under KDE

[Luke Plant]

I use Kubuntu (KDE 4.2, Jaunty), and I also have Ubuntu (i.e. Gnome packages) installed.

When I run GTK apps under KDE, they make various sounds (when clicking buttons, closing dialogs etc), For a start, this is just annoying (I don't know why this is the default).

But there is no way to disable them. I tried running gnome-sound-properties and disabling the sounds, but it makes no difference. (I have already disabled all KDE sounds).

Some Gnome applications (e.g. totem) don't seem to make these sounds. Other ones (e.g. gnometris) do, and most GTK apps (e.g. gimp, audacity, wxWindows apps). Perhaps these GTK apps are actually linked against gnome libs, I don't know.

Other people have experienced this bug: http://forum.kde.org/weirdness-with-gtk-sounds-t-11847.html

(The only peculiarity in my system is I don't have pulseaudio installed - I manually removed it because it interferes with other apps being able to play sound. I doubt this makes a difference to whether these apps play sounds or not).

[onyxrev (entp)]

I have this same problem. Every time I select a new tool in GIMP I get some sort of blooping sound. Closing dialog boxes is similarly annoying. Can't turn it off as it seems to ignore Gnome preferences.

[jfreak0126 (jfreak0126)]

I confirm this bug as well.

[Alex (loxal)]

Now, there are 4 days until the final release and this bug still haven't been fixed! The Linux Desktop (in all distributions) is getting worser and worser and after 9 years of Linux I'm thinking of switching over to Windows :( I'm fed up with this kind of bugs that cost me time, the time I would like to spend getting my work done and not tinkering around with those kind of bugs!

[Alex (loxal)]

WORKAROUND:
aptitude purge ubuntu-sounds

[auxbuss (launchpad-auxbuss)]

I can also confirm this bug. I do have pulseaudio installed. This is a deal breaker for me.

[onyxrev (entp)]

Seems like a lot of these 4.2 bugs are being held-off until 4.3. That's my impression, at least.

[Vanessa Dannenberg (vanessadannenberg)]

This also affects KDE 3.5.10 (Pearson Computing 'Jaunty Remix' packages) on two machines in our house. Very annoying.

[Evan Martin (Chromium) (evan-chromium)]

We've had a bug similar to this reported by Google Chrome (or Chromium) users.

[Anakin Starkiller (sunrider)]

I can confirm this bug on latest KDE 4.3, Jaunty. Quite annoying !

[derat (dan-launchpad-erat)]

I think that to disable these sounds, you need to have gnome-settings-daemon (or another daemon implementing XSETTINGS) running, with the Net/EnableEventSounds setting set to (integer) 0. I see a Debian ITP for "xsettings-kde" at http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=512562; it looks like it's present in Debian Unstable currently. Alternately, I wrote a small implementation at http://code.google.com/p/xsettingsd/ that may be useful for people who aren't running a desktop environment.

[derat (dan-launchpad-erat)]

I did a bit more testing. Sounds are played when both Net/EnableEventSounds and Net/EnableInputFeedbackSounds are set to 1, but not otherwise. This lines up with the descriptions of gtk-enable-event-sounds ("Whether to play any event sounds at all") and gtk-enable-input-feedback-sounds ("Whether to play event sounds as feedback to user input") from the GtkSettings documentation at http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/unstable/GtkSettings.html.

[Anakin Starkiller (sunrider)]

derat >> thx for your involvment, is there something in particular that we can do to launch gnome-settings-daemon with some parameters when KDE starts ?

[derat (dan-launchpad-erat)]

No idea; I'm not running KDE. You probably want to use KDE's XSETTINGS daemon rather than GNOME's, though, since a given screen can only have a single settings daemon running.

[José P Valdés (sevmpe-deactivatedaccount)]

I was having this issue with latest Karmic and I added:

gtk-enable-event-sounds=0
gtk-enable-input-feedback-sounds=0

to ~/.gtkrc-2.0-kde4. Firefox seems silenced so far.

[Anakin Starkiller (sunrider)]

Thanks José, it's working now ;)

[Kels (echukwuogor)]

Fix from #14 solved this for me in Karmic Beta too.

[shawnlandden (shawnlandden)]

also effects LXDE (and probably XFCE and all non-gnome DEs)

[shawnlandden (shawnlandden)]

alternate workaround to #14:

apt-get remove libcanberra-gtk-module

[Alessandro Ghersi (alessandro-ghersi)]

This problem is still present in Natty, at least with Chromium. If you run Chromium in KDE and you have also installed ubuntu-desktop, Chromium has a sound by default when you open/close a tab and is very annoying.
To fix this issue you have to start gnome-settings-daemon after the KDE session is started.

[mokaddim (shiplu-net)]

I am facing this problem with chromium. Very annoying.