I'm hearing BELLS!!!!

[leftystrat]

I was minding my own business, with 3.6 installed to my hard drive, when I started hearing bells.
Since my aural hallucinations never involve bells, I tried to find the source. This turned out to be my computer's speakers.

Try as I may, I can't find out how to shut them off (even WITH medicine!). They go off every 15 minutes and there's no apparent place to turn them off. I run a very minimal GUI setup with no bells and whistles, themes, or sounds.

When I pull up the processes, the only thing that looks halfway relevant is KNOTIFY, but the noises don't stop when I kill the process.


thanks,
jeff the momentarily sane

[Cuddles]

... They go off every 15 minutes ...

thanks,
jeff the momentarily sane

No clue, but, if I was going to guess, I'd say, you started some kind of timer, or alarm clock program... ( tea cooker, alarm clock, etc... )

Check your task bar, check your clock, and then check the ( default ) four window screens ( desktops ) - if that doesnt get you anywhere, look for something in your BIOS... Possibly look in Control Center, in Power Management, and while you are there, check screen saver - possibly something...

How are you checking your processes? With top ???? Top is great, for what it was designed for, but not for "snapshots" of all the processess running... Wait for your "Grandfather Clock Chime" to go off in fifteen minutes, and in a Konsole, run ps auxw -=- then scroll back through the output, and see if you can find something running...

Hope this helps,
Ms. Cuddles

[Markus]

Are you sure it's not the processor or some such getting too warm? Some mobos use sounds that resemble loud bell chimes as an alert.

[leftystrat]

Are you sure it's not the processor or some such getting too warm? Some mobos use sounds that resemble loud bell chimes as an alert.

It appears to be every 15 minutes and is very definitely time-related. It bongs X amount of times on the hour.

Thanks for bringing up the mobo though - I didn't know about that.

[Cuddles]

... It appears to be every 15 minutes and is very definitely time-related. It bongs X amount of times on the hour ...


Another thought... Have you been setting anything up in cron? You might want to check if cron is running, and then, if it is running, check both the root and your users "crontab daily" files - see if you have an entry that is being fired off every "15" minutes...

This "thing" seriously sounds like ( no pun intended ) a chime, or alarm program, or a reminder type program... If it is being fired off in cron, it would not show up in any process output, until it is run... If it is run, and sleeps, it should show up in a process output... knotify is a standard process... You might want to go into Control Center, System Notifications, and click on the "Disable All Sounds" - and see if it is coming from something in KDE...

Hope this helps,
Ms. Cuddles

[leftystrat]

Thanks for your ideas.
I checked CRON - nothing.
I have been all through the control center, turned all system sounds off (again), and still hear bells.
Since it's predictable, I'm ruling out mobo warnings. It comes at 2 minutes past every quarter hour.

The normal programs I run are Evolution, XMMS, Gnumeric, and gtk-gnutella. I have turned each one off, one at a time, with no change (and they've never made noise in any other system, nor has any other installation of Knoppix). Sounds are always turned off because I can't stand them :)


I did a `psw' and the only apps using CPU time were:

0.5 7.7 /etc/X11/X -dpi 75 -nolisten tcp vt7 -auth /var/run/xauth/A:0-wNVKW
0.1 1.1 33016 5668 ? S Jan24 18:18 kdeinit: kdesktop
0.1 1.2 29852 5816 ? S Jan24 26:18 kdeinit: kicker
0.3 4.7 47244 22928 ? S Jan25 65:38 /usr/lib/opera/7.54-20041210.5/opera
0.1 9.4 77272 45728 ? S Feb05 0:45 evolution-1.4

This is consistent over multiple psw's. I run it the second the bells start.

Nothing obvious shows up in the KDE Process Table, with the exception of the aforementioned KNOTIFY. It has a quarter note next to it, so I kept stopping the process, but the bells didn't stop and it kept coming back.


Lastly, I'm not the only one hearing the bells and my doctor assures me that I don't need any Special Medicine to stop them.


thanks,
jeff

[Cuddles]

Not that I was implying that you were "making all this up", hopefully, you didnt think that...

I looked at "anything" that knotify saves, and nothing is time oriented, mostly, when this happens - make this sound, kind of stuff - like, you get email, make this sound - stuff... Nothing ties to any specific time event... So, I dont think knotify is doing it, unless, this is a long shot, "something" is happening as an event, that causes the sound to be used in knotify.

I dont think knotify is your culprit, especially, if you have already done the following, in a root Konsole:
root@morpheus:/mnt/hdc2/Holding/ISO# kcontrol

went to the Sound % Multimedia -> System Notifications -=- Checked "Apply to all applications" and clicked on "turn Off All" with the "Sounds" in the drop down box - then clicked "Apply" -=- you might want to check the "System Bell" and ensure that "Use System Bell instead of System Notifications" is not checked as well...

These two things should disable "any" sounds... but, since this is a "time" related thing, I still cant imagine that "something" isnt running for a "pre-determined" time, and then firing off a sound - tea cooker, timer, alarm clock, etc...

I'm at a loss here, now...
Ms. Cuddles

[sakiZ]

Cuddles, check in you bios power management section.

Something needs turned off or disabled.

That's my guess.

sakiZ