#824427 cinnamon: bell sound appears in all kinds of places

Package:
cinnamon
Source:
cinnamon
Description:
Innovative and comfortable desktop
Submitter:
Christoph Anton Mitterer
Date:
2026-08-30 18:13:03 UTC
Severity:
normal
Tags:
#824427#5
Date:
2016-05-15 20:27:53 UTC
From:
To:
Hey.

Not sure whether this can be considered a "bug"...
Since 3.0, in all kinds of things the "bell" sound appears
in all kinds of places, where it didn't before...

e.g. when doing an unsuccessful tab completion in
gnome-terminal (which at least has an option to disable the
bell)... or in Firefox when searching for text and that isn't
found.

That's quite annoying and I didn't find a way to get rid of
it via the sound applet,...
It is possible in my system cause the soundcard itself
(though only ALSA exports this and Pulseaudio once again sucks
here), allows me to "mute" the "beep" (which seems to be used
for the bell.
But this is of course no solution for all those people
with cards who don't export that as a mixer item.


Cheers,
Chris.

#824427#10
Date:
2016-05-16 13:22:33 UTC
From:
To:
Hi!

El Domingo 15 Mayo 2016 22:27 CEST, Christoph Anton Mitterer <calestyo@scientia.net> Ha escrito:
However, the default is still false as far as I could find.

Can you please show the output of:
dconf read /org/cinnamon/desktop/wm/preferences/audible-bell

As this is an accessibility feature, the setting is located in the
Accessibility settings panel, in the Keyboard tab.

Can you confirm that you had this set to true and that setting it
to false makes this go away?

Thanks.

#824427#15
Date:
2016-05-16 20:00:20 UTC
From:
To:
I see...
That gives no output, exit status = 0.

In dconf-editor it's shown as false.
It's false there either.
Nope, was both false... and as soon as I un-mute the beep item in
alsamixer, it gives me bells again, when I e.g. search in Firefox
(Ctrl-F) and enter a string that doesn't exist.


Cheers,
Chris.

#824427#20
Date:
2016-08-27 01:03:21 UTC
From:
To:
Control: forwarded -1 https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/5253#issuecomment-242883632
#824427#29
Date:
2026-05-13 15:23:02 UTC
From:
To:
Hi, I saw the upstream issue closed after some years of inactivity, but
I not understand if the bug is solved or still present (I don't have
time for a thorough check)

@Christoph Anton Mitterer: Can you please tell me if it is still present
and is it problematic?

#824427#42
Date:
2026-08-30 18:11:16 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Christoph,

I'm closing this bug: the cause is gone since muffin 5.4.1, and I've
reassigned the report to muffin, where the code lives.

What you hit was a regression in muffin 3.0. Up to muffin 2.8 the window
manager disabled the X server's audible bell whenever it was built with
libcanberra support, and played the bell itself. That code was dropped in
3.0, so from Cinnamon 3.0 on the X audible bell stayed enabled and every
XBell() from an application reached the hardware beep directly — exactly
what you described, and why muting the "Beep" mixer item was the only way
out even though audible-bell was false.

muffin 5.4.1 brought the disabling back, now unconditionally, in
src/x11/meta-x11-display.c:


/* We are playing sounds using libcanberra support, we handle the
  * bell whether its an audible bell or a visible bell */
XkbChangeEnabledControls (x11_display->xdisplay, XkbUseCoreKbd,
                           XkbAudibleBellMask, 0);


So on bookworm and later the stray beeps cannot happen any more. Note
that the upstream issue this bug was forwarded to was closed by a bot for
inactivity rather than by a fix; the problem was solved by that change
instead.

The flip side is that with audible-bell false by default nothing is
played in place of the beep, which is now tracked as #1036121.