Monthly Archives: April 2009

Oracle to buy Sun Microsystems

Posted by Praveen Kumar on April 20, 2009 2 comments

This morning there was an official announcement that Oracle has offered to buy Sun Microsystems for $9.50 per stock, and Sun’s board agreed. The market rumors surrounding Sun for the last few weeks suggested that something was looming. But, Oracle was a surprise to me. It looks like closing the deal typically takes from 3 to 9 months. It would be interesting to see how Sun would be integrated into Oracle.

Also, Oracle’s attitude towards Open Source remains largely unknown at this point. Sun did some extensive Open Sourcing in the past few years. It would be interesting to see how this deal would affect the direction of those products.

To know more information about the deal, read the Sun’s press release or Oracle’s press release. Oracle has put up an information page and answered some of the frequently asked questions in there.

Turning off loud system beep in OpenSolaris Gnome and GDM

Posted by Praveen Kumar on April 1, 2009 5 comments

Since OpenSolaris started using Gnome 2.24, I started getting loud system beeps those were produced on the PC speaker device that by-passes the audio device. Gnome uses kbd to generate this beep. This beep is so loud that it is really annoying. Also it hurts one’s ears when listening to music using a headset. The volume of the beep can’t be controlled by the system volume control. To turn off the beep or control the volume, one must use the xset(1) utility. The beep can be turned off by issuing the command xset -b or xset b off in (Gnome) terminal. One can also control the volume through xset b . However this is not persistent across logins. You will lose this setting once you log off and log on. Theoretically adding this to ~/.xprofile should work to make it persistent. It used to work till snv_101a. However for unknown root cause, it doesn’t work anymore.

Gnome:
In order to make this persistent, one should edit the Gconf properties for Metacity. First install the SUNWgnome-config-editor package by issuing the command pfexec pkg install SUNWgnome-config-editor. Then invoke gconf-editor from a terminal. Go to apps -> metacity -> general and uncheck audible_bell property and exit gconf-editor. This should disable the system beep for all applications under Gnome and make the change persistent.

Turn Gnome sytem beep off

Turn Gnome sytem beep off

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