Comment 54 for bug 437429

Well, I see two better options than physically doing something to the speakers:

1. Use another display/login manager. There are plenty of other ones out there, gdm is just happens to be the default for Gnome... Actually that's exactly what GNU/Linux is all about - choice - because no one forces you to use crappy software (what the default Ubuntu installation is becoming). So just remove or somehow disable the default packages and install the good ones.

2. Create a simple package that inserts a hook in apt-get post-installation phase for setting the above gconf values (disabling sound).