Ubuntu – Help Removing Battery notification sound [16.04]

batteryindicatorlaptoppower-managementsurface

  • First, some relavent information:
    I'm running Ubuntu 16.04 on a Microsoft Surface Book, using an awesome, reliable, custom kernel from this repository. The Surface Book has 2 batteries. One battery in the Surface screen that can be detatched and work standalone like a tablet, and one battery in the keyboard.

  • The issue:
    When my Surface Book batteries get low, Ubuntu notifies me with a pleasant 'chime' sound that I'm at xx%. All is well… The problem is that when I plug in my Surface Book, The pleasant 'chime' sound goes off almost every 10 seconds. Upon asking the repository maintainer what the issue could be, he basically said that the issue cannot be fixed on his end because the way the Surface Book works is that one battery charges for 10 or so seconds, then it stops charging while the other battery charges for 10 or so seconds. Basically the batteries don't both charge at the same time- they alternate back and fourth. My belief is that this causes Ubuntu to think I'm unplugging the charger to one of the batteries although I am not.

  • Solution?
    For now, I just want to turn the 'chime' off completely. I have tried uninstalling a few things like indicator-battery to no avail, and several other things. I cannot seem to figure out what package the chime is coming from. Otherwise i could just replace the wav or ogg file with a silent tone!! Any suggestions?

  • Please help, I have searched online for hours a day over the course of several weeks trying to fix this issue, and cannot find anybody else having the same problem.

  • Thanks!

Best Answer

Related to this, but not quite the same. Posting as it might be helpful. Using Ubuntu 18.04.2.

I had issues with a battery utilization alert/sound that would play repeatedly as my battery would switch back and forth between fully charged and current being drawn from it. This was particularly noticeable when loading webpages that contained video players, a process that involves more computations than the system's base state.

Anyway, the solution for me was to rename a oga file in a similar directory as this one. I moved the following files and it appears to have resolved my issue (difficult to say as there are other factors in play that I do not have control over [the software playing the sound] and other factors whose values I no longer have an outward indicator for [the battery's charge level]). Files were at the locations:

/usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/power-plug.oga /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/power-unplug.oga

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