GDM, please don’t beep at login

Here’s a tip for all you GNOME users. If you’re using GDM, where the system boots directly to a graphical login, you’ve probably noticed that the computer beeps when it displays the login prompt. As it turns out, you can turn this off.

As root, edit your gdm.conf file, (mine’s inside the /etc/X11/gdm directory, yours probably is too) and add this line:

SoundOnLogin=false

If you’d rather the computer play a sound, you can set that up too. For example:

SoundOnLogin=/usr/lib/openoffice/share/gallery/sounds/cow.wav

You can also define sounds which will be played when someone successfully logs in, or when someone fat fingers it, and fails to login successfully. See the comments in the gdm.conf file for more info.