I wanted to enable my internal pc speaker; you know that annoying beeping thing. Normally the pcspkr module is blacklisted by default (since it’s so annoying), so I re-enabled it.

modprobe pcspkr
printf \\a

No beep.

Upon closer inspection of my computer, turns out there’s no actual speaker inside my computer. Well isn’t that a shame. I did however discover that you can simulate one by using X resources:

URxvt*bell-command: play ~/awp.wav

The actual sound will obviously go through your normal speakers or headphones, but that’s okay. Now I can do things like:

unrar x big_movie.rar \
  && cp Big_movie.mkv /mnt/NAS/movies \
  && printf \\a

and walk away from the computer. I will still hear the sound of the CS 1.6 AWP firing off at me when the operation is done.

The bell-command can be anything, and the play command is part of the ALSA packages.