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Login Screen Sound – How to Disable Drum Beat Sound on Login Screen

lightdmlogin-screen

I would have expected System ▸ Administration ▸ Login Screen ▸ Play login sound to control this, but unchecking it does not prevent the drum beat sound from playing.

Best Answer

The start-up sound can be disabled editing the Unity Greeter configuration. Running the following from a terminal will do this:

echo -e '[com.canonical.unity-greeter]\nplay-ready-sound = false' \
    | sudo tee -a /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/50_unity-greeter.gschema.override
sudo glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/

If you are running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS make sure you have updates installed as this feature was added in an update.

Related Solutions

LightDM – How to Disable Automatic Login
gksudo gedit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

It displays some text as follows:

[SeatDefaults]  
greeter-session=unity-greeter  
user-session=ubuntu  
autologin-user=username

Solution

  1. This <username> would be your particular user name that is automatically logged in with or without password. Delete this username and type in the administrative username or leave it blank.
  2. Shut down the system. It will go back to the login selection screen. Just power down the system and put it on again.
Ubuntu – Login Screen source code

Authentication is implemented using PAM, the Pluggable Authentication Modules.

Linux-PAM is a system of libraries that handle the authentication tasks of applications (services) on the system. The library provides a stable general interface (Application Programming Interface - API) that privilege granting programs (such as login(1) and su(1)) defer to to perform standard authentication tasks.

The configuration for the login service is in /etc/pam.d/login. It's well-commented, and very informative.

It is PAM's modules that access to the password file, when needed. In systems with centralized authentication (for example LDAP), the login service may never need to access the password file.

See more info in man 7 pam.

Related Question
  • LightDM – How to Disable Automatic Login
  • Ubuntu – Login Screen source code