Help! XFCE event sounds in Rawhide -- make it stop!

[Matthias Clasen]

On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 07:41 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 11:09:49AM +0200, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> > I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with Xfce, because Xfce doesn't
> > have sound effects. Have you enabled "Launch Gnome Services on startup"
> > in "Sessions and Startup"? If so, this might come from Gnome and you
> > need to configure it with gnome-sound-properties.
> 
> So, yeah, I've tried that, and it gives me an error:
> 
>   Unable to start the settings manager 'gnome-settings-daemon'.
>   
>   Without the GNOME settings manager running, some preferences may not take
>   effect. This could indicate a problem with Bonobo, or a non-GNOME (e.g.
>   KDE) settings manager may already be active and conflicting with the GNOME
>   settings manager.
> 
> However, I am able to make changes there, like disabling "system sounds",
> and the choices I make persist -- and the sounds don't go away no matter
> what I do. 
> 

Let me try to clear this up.
The thing that is responsible for making the sound is the
libcanberra-gtk module that is shipped with libcanberra. It gets loaded
by all gtk applications by means of an xinitrc.d file setting the
GTK_MODULES envvar. The module respects some XSettings to turn sound
events on and off: Net/SoundThemeName, Net/EnableInputFeedbackSounds,
Net/EnableEventSounds. In Gnome, these XSettings are handled by the
xsettings manager thats part of gnome-settings-daemon. 

So there are several ways to get rid of event sounds in Xfce (in
decreasing order of brutality):

- uninstall libcanberra

- remove the xinitrc.d file, or unset GTK_MODULES somehow

- make the Xfce xsettings manager handle those settings