Your desktop, therefore, might have a 15 cent speaker in the system unit under the
desk, packed full of dust and competing with multiple system fans to be heard.
There??™s no way to really control the bell volume, because the PC??™s speaker circuit
simply clocks out a 5-volt square wave of adjustable frequency.
To set the bell, use the b subcommand provided by xset:
$ xset b volume pitch duration
Where volume is the volume level from 0??“100%, pitch is in Hertz, and duration is in
milliseconds. The X.org server will actually shorten the duration based on the volume
setting, in a feeble attempt to make up for the lack of hardware volume control.
The default bell settings in the X.org server are 50% volume, 400 Hz, and 100 ms,
which are reasonable for most purposes. If you can??™t hear the bell, try 100%, 1,200
Hz, and 100 ms:
$ xset b 100 1200 100
If you don??™t like the result, just experiment; given the cheap speaker, you??™ll probably
want to stay in the 100 Hz??“14,000 Hz range.
6.6
102 Chapter 6: X Utility Programs
You can leave out any of the numeric arguments to xset b starting at the end; if you
leave them all out, the settings reset to the defaults. To turn off the bell entirely, use
the following:
$ xset b off
The X bell mechanism provides a trivial way to give audio feedback in a script; this
can be useful for various quick-and-dirty applications.
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