Annoyed by the system beep from the speaker inside your computer's case? You've probably noticed it when pressing backspace on the terminal prompt, or when Firefox's find function can't locate your query. Using Compiz, it's possible to turn off the beep and replace it with a cool visual effect.

I hate the internal beep speaker. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. Okay, maybe not that much hate, but I really don’t like having it enabled. It beeps anytime the terminal cursor goes in the wrong direction. Or if the sound isn’t working quite right when I’m setting things up. Or if it’s time to put another quarter in the dryer. It’s just a nuisance.

It's not usually a big deal, getting sound working in Linux or BSD. In my case, however, my laptop's internal sound module is dead, and I've substituted a USB sound module from DealExtreme.com that costs about $2. It works, but it can be hard to get a given distribution to pipe the sound there rather than to the dead internal sound system.

"...The feeling of not being able to fix buggy software is very depressing. Manufacturers of washing machines should ship source code with every device.

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (known by the acronym ALSA) is a Linux kernel component intended to replace the original Open Sound System (OSS) for providing device drivers for sound cards.

So I often hear the phrase: “Sound on Linux is Confusing”. While I don’t totally disagree with this statement, as with everything on Linux the sound system is pretty logical and if you follow through the steps you can demystify things pretty quickly. So this article will explain how things work on Mandriva and should ensure users are more comfortable with “how things work”.

You'll spend plenty of time in the terminal, so why not customize it to suit your tastes? This article steps you through installing and configuring bashish, a terminal prompt theming utility.

The package libcanberra installed by default in Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) is version 0.6 , it seems to be obsolete and causes the system sound to work ineffectively, the following three steps will solve this problem.

I found a useful sound effect in an online video from NASA which replaces an earlier temporary sound I used in a scene soundtrack for the Lunatics pilot, "No Children in Space." I'm going to extract the sound from the video (with VLC), cut out the sound I need, clean it up, and insert it into an existing sound mix (all with Audacity).