chewearn's blog

When I first started using Pidgin in eeePC 900 (running Ubuntu Hardy), I wonder why there was no notification sounds. In Pidgin, you can enable various sounds for when someone login into the IM or chat, logout, when someone send you a message, and when you send a message back.

However, none of these sounds can be heard when running Pidgin in a eeePC. I have no such problem with Pidgin running in a normal PC.

Upon investigation, I discovered that the sounds do work, except it was extremely soft. You have to crank up the volume to maximum to barely hear them. To workaround this problem, I created alternative notification sounds which were basically beep sequences. The beeps were significantly louder than the default sounds in Pidgin. You can freely download them here.

How to install

First, make a back-up of existing notification sounds.

sudo cp -r /usr/share/sounds/purple /usr/share/sounds/purple-old

Extract the files from the compressed tarball, which you have downloaded above.

tar xvf pidgin-beeps.tar.gz

Copy the sound files to the location where Pidgin could find them.

sudo cp pidgin-beeps/* /usr/share/sounds/purple/