Re: activating the beep

[Óscar Fuentes]

Frederic Baldit <frederic38300@aol.com> writes:

> I am a new emacs user (23.2.1)on debian squeeze. When reading the book
> "Learning GNU Emacs" (from D. Cameron), I see that emacs should normally
> beep in certain circumstances, e.g. when leaving emacs after the current
> buffer has been modified and the changes haven't been saved to the
> corresponding file and you don't answer "yes" or "no".
>
> In my case, no beep at all is heard, and I cannot figure out why. I have
> added in my .emacs file the line: 
>
> (setq ring-bell-function 'beep)
>
> with no success. I also tried browsing the customization, unsuccesfully.

By default the beep that Emacs produces goes to the PC speaker. Some modern
desktop machines (and all laptops AFAIK) don't have a PC
speaker. Another possibility is that your OS has the pcspkr kernel
module disabled (this is the case of Ubuntu since some releases
ago). You can check that pcspkr is loaded typing this on a console:

lsmod | grep pcspkr

If the above outputs nothing, try this load the module:

sudo modprobe pcspkr

Then on Emacs pressing C-g (Control+g) should produce a beep.

You also can check that the beep is not muted. On my Kubuntu 10.10
install this is performed executing alsamixer on a console:

alsamixer

press the left arrow until you see a vertical bar with the word "Beep"
under it. If it is muted the letters MM are shown over it. Be sure that
"Beep" is highlighted, press M to unmute it and the up arrow to increase
the volume.

HTH.