Ambience

Hello Readers! A while ago I noticed that there were no Startup & Shutdown sounds for Crunchbang, nor an easy way to configure to have them; so I set out to fix this.

The result – Ambience.

Ambience is a small graphical and command-line program to effectively and easily set Startup & Shutdown Sounds. And don’t worry, there aren’t any daemons running in the background, slowing down you system (this is the ‘Faster Ubuntu’ afterall ).

Ambience uses a clever system of just running at startup and logout to minimize any lost memory/cpu power, but give you all the multimedia power you want!

Below are instructions on how to get it set up and working!

Installation

First of all we need to get it installed, to do this:

Download the file at

http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=77406

And save it to your Home folder. Then type the following into a terminal

sudo dpkg -i ~/77406-ambience_0.1.1-1_i386.deb

Ambience should now be installed on your system!

Now we have got it on our system, we need to start it up, do this by typing in a terminal

ambience --gui

The GUI part of the program should now load, and you’ll be faced with a screen like this

Right, first you’ll see the two sections, one for logon (or startup) sounds and one for logout (logging out). NOTE: Because we haven’t got any sounds configured yet, you will see the play buttons cannot be pressed, this will change in the next step.

Configuration P1

Lets start configuring some sounds then, first download a sound that you like from the internet etc. and save it in your Home Folder. Then if you still haven’t got Ambience open, startup it up again using the command ‘ambience’ and depending on which event you want it to sound, click the respective ‘Edit’ button.

A file chooser dialog should come up, and in this, navigate to the sound file you downloaded earlier, and click ‘Ok’. Ambience then sets this sound as the one you want to use, and you will notice the play button for this event can now be selected. If you were to click on this, you may now hear a preview of your currently configured sound. NOTE : You may now delete the file you downloaded, Ambience keeps a copy of it for safe keeping

Configuration P2

Now we have got our sound selected, there is one thing more to do. We need to tell Crunchbang to call on Ambience on the Logon, Logout or Shutdown. We do this by running the following command in the terminal.

sudo ambience --setup-logon

Or for logoff

sudo ambience --setup-logoff

Ambience will now configure Crunchbang to do as you wished, this should only take a few seconds, at which point you will be met with that magnificent word, “Done”.

NOTE: If you wish to change your sound after you have run your command, don’t worry; just go into the Graphical part of Ambience and select a new sound, there is no need to run the setup again!

Now all that is left to do is logoff or logon back on again and you should be met with the sound you chose earlier!

The Crazy Idea – Uninstallation

You can remove Ambience like you would any other program, through Synaptic. However you may start get a few small errors if you don’t let Ambience undo the changes it made earlier. To do this, run the command

sudo ambience --uninstall

Then Ambience will undo the changes it made, however it will leave the sound files you configured, so if you ever realise your mistake of uninstalling it you may re-install it with them already still loaded. NOTE : However you will have to go through the steps of Configuration P2 again.

How have you been getting on with Ambience?
Post any problems (or preferably praise ) in the comments.