Make Your XS 0.6 System Speaker Beep Melodiously

I have an onboard sound card on the XS 0.6, but typically don’t have speakers plugged in.  What if I want audio alerts?  There’s a really fun utility called beep that lets you easily play all kinds of tones with the system speaker, if your motherboard supports that.


The source code is at http://johnath.com/beep/  I got the tarball and extracted it.

wget http://johnath.com/beep/beep-1.3.tar.gz
tar xvf beep-1.3.tar.gz

Go into the source directory.

cd beep-1.3

In the Makefile, change this line:

MAN_DIR=/usr/man/man1

To this:

MAN_DIR=/usr/share/man/man1

Now just:

make
make install

You should be all good to go with beep now:

[root@schoolserver ~]# whereis beep
beep: /usr/bin/beep /usr/share/man/man1/beep.1.gz

If you want any user from anywhere to be able to use beep:

chmod 4755 /usr/bin/beep

I googled around for fun sounds to play and found the theme to Beverly Hills Cop.  When you paste it into a script, make sure it’s all on one line.

beep -f 659 -l 460 -n -f 784 -l 340 -n -f 659 -l 230 -n -f 659 -l 110 -n -f 880 -l 230 -n -f 659 -l 230 -n -f 587 -l 230 -n -f 659 -l 460 -n -f 988 -l 340 -n -f 659 -l 230 -n -f 659 -l 110 -n -f 1047-l 230 -n -f 988 -l 230 -n -f 784 -l 230 -n -f 659 -l 230 -n -f 988 -l 230 -n -f 1318 -l 230 -n -f 659 -l 110 -n -f 587 -l 230 -n -f 587 -l 110 -n -f 494 -l 230 -n -f 740 -l 230 -n -f 659 -l 460

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