Free beep software for linux

beep is a console bell. I just got so tired of being limited to printf("a"); when I wanted a terminal beep. This program isnt supposed to be anything stupendous, its just
supposed to get the job done. Its intended purpose in life is to live inside shell/perl scripts, and allow a little more granularity than you get with the default terminal bell. Maybe Im the only one who thinks this is useful.
As noted in the man page, some users are running into a situation where beep dies with a complaint from ioctl(). The reason for this, as Peter Tirsek was nice enough to point out to me, stems from how the kernel handles beeps attempt to poke at (for non-programmers: ioctl is a sort of catch-all function that lets you poke at things that have no other predefined poking-at mechanism) the tty, which is how it beeps. The short story is that the kernel checks that either:
- you are the superuser
- you own the current tty
What this means is that root can always make beep work (to the best of my knowledge!), and that any local user can make beep work, BUT a non-root remote user cannot use beep in its natural state. Whats worse, an xterm, or other x-session counts, as far as the kernel is concerned, as remote, so beep wont work from a non-priviledged xterm either. I had originally chalked this up to a bug, but theres actually nothing I can do about it, and it really is a Good Thing that the kernel does things this way. There is also a solution.
By default beep is not installed with the suid bit set, because that would just be zany. On the other hand, if you do make it suid root, all your problems with beep bailing on ioctl calls will magically vanish, which is pleasant, and the only reason not t is that any suid program is a potential security hole. Conveniently, beep is very short, so auditing it is pretty straightforward.
Enhancements:
- Man pages now gzip -9 for better compression
- Table of frequencies added to man page
- Fix for platforms with unsigned chars
- On ioctl() errors, beep will now do a printf("a") so that, at very least, youget a beep.

Beepage is a Unix-based text paging package. Text pages sent by the client over TCP/IP are received by the provided server, which queues and transmits the data to any paging service providers that support the Telocator Alpha-numeric Protocol.
The beepage package includes two programs, a cleint and a server: beepaged, the Text Page Protocol daemon which accepts pages on a well-known TCP port and transmits them over one or more modems to a TAP (aka PET, IXA) paging-service provider; and beep, a command-line TPP client.
Two beepage clients are currently available:
"beep" a Unix command-line interface
"winbeepage" a Windows graphical interface
A Mac OS X version is nearing release.
The server is supported on the following platforms:
Solaris
Linux
OpenBSD
It probably works on other Unix-like operating systems.
Enhancements:
- Improved TAP banner detection
- First of several fixes related to the addition of MIME support
- Cleaned up exit codes

Audio::Beep::BSD::beep is an Audio::Beep player module using the beep program.

IMPORTANT!

This player module IS NOT TESTED! I found docs about the BSD beep program but I never had a chance to use it or test it. So use it AT YOUR OWN RISK and report me bugs if possible.

SYNOPIS

my $player = Audio::Beep::BSD::beep->new([%options]);

USAGE

The new class method can receive as option in hash fashion the following directives
path => /full/path/to/beep

With the path option you can set the full path to the beep program in the object. If you dont use this option the new method will look anyway in some likely places where beep should be before returning undef.

device => /dev/myspeaker

Use the device option if your speaker device is different from "/dev/speaker". AFAIK this device exists only on i386 architecture. That also means that this module wont probably work for different architectures.

BMP is a multimedia player that currently uses a skinned user interface based on Winamp 2.x skins.

The original project name was "beep". Then we discovered that another project of the same name existed, and extended it to "Beep Media Player" to distinguish the two.

This new name is of course cumbersome to type, so it was informally shortened to BMP (or sometimes BeepMP) for everyday usage. Along the way, somehow or another, some of the developers no longer recognize it as an acronym. There is still no official word on whether to drop the original form. But whatever happens, the name BMP is here to stay.

Milosz Derezynski started hacking on XMMS alone in the fall of 2003 and eventually made it compile against GTK+2. He went on to release it to the public under the name Beep and stirred up considerable interest among XMMS users who were eager to move their favourite application to GTK+2. From that moment on, the way was clear.

Beep Media Player RSS feed provider is a tool for generating RSS feeds of songs played by BMP.

bmp-rss-feeder is a plugin for the Beep Media Player that makes it possible to publish an RSS feed containing the names of recently played songs.

The feed can be published both locally and on the Internet.

Syslog is a almost standard UN*X daemon which gathers all the info, errors or critical messages from the local computer or other hosts on the network. For more info about syslog itself, see the corresponding syslog manpages.
Before using Interceptor, you must create 8 fifo files in /var/run/interceptor, (debug, info, notice, warning, err, crit, alert, emerg) and modify the /etc/syslog.conf so that syslog sends its messages in the corresponding fifo for a given level, e.g.
*.debug |/var/run/interceptor/debug
The mkintfifos included script will update /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit and /etc/syslog.conf for you. When done, restart your computer, install the interceptor applet and load it on the taskbar.
A button appears, which will flash green when a debug, info or notice message occurs, orange when a warning or error message occurs and red when crit, alert or emerg.
If you click on this button, a list of received messages will be displayed.
Interceptor can react to some messages according to a pattern->action scheme with up to 2 argument strings. The available actions are the following ones:
- Beep: Simply issues a beep.
- Message: Displays a dialog box with first arg string as the wanted message and optionnaly executes a shell command when the yes button is clicked. The command itself is contained in the second arg string.
- Redirect: Redirects the current message towards a specific log view.
- Run: Silently runs a shell command contained in arg string 2 and appends arg string 1 at the end of the system messages list.
Remark: if the first argument of a Run alert is null, the first line of the shell command stdout is appended to the messages list, with Info as the level and Interceptor as the source.
The pattern rules obey to the QRegExp syntax. See QRegExp in the Qt documentation for more details. In addition to the standard QRegExp syntax, Interceptor uses pattern groups, i.e. it can retrieve substring enclosed in group parenthesis. Example:
abc(.+)def
This group contains any string enclosed within abc and def. A substitution is made whenever a message matches with a given regexp. The variables $1, $2, $3 and $4 will be replaced with the corresponding pattern group in both arg 1 and arg 2 strings.
the variables $D and $T will be substituted with the current date and time
The patterns are tried against the
level##source!!host%%text
string, where level is debug, info etc..., source is the info source, i.e. kernel, the daemon name, lpr etc..., host is the hostname and text, the text of the message.
You can also choose a better suited icon, such as floppy, network or CDROM icons, for your dialog boxes.
When you select the preferences kicker applet menu, a tab widget will appears, which will allow you to edit the pattern->action rules, and some default options, such as the level colors and number of lines on the messages list box.
Enhancements:
- Aspects Scan list.
- A few bugs fixed.

Eterm is a vt102 terminal emulator intended as a replacement for xterm. It is designed with a Freedom of Choice philosophy, leaving as much power, flexibility, and freedom as possible in the hands of the user.
Eterm is designed to look good and work well, but takes a feature-rich approach rather than one of minimalism. Current features include color support, background images (all Imlib-supported formats), theme support, and pseudo-transparency.
Enhancements:
- This release contains primarily bugfixes, particularly for dead keys, but has a few new features thrown in as well, like support for a "beep command" to replace the PC speaker beep, EWMH/xcompmgr window opacity support, 256-color support, and NetWM startup ID support.

Olive is (yet another) GNU/Linux Live distribution. Olive LiveCD distirbution offers quite a good deal of new technologies, hardly witnessed ever before, as well as some of the more common pieces of software. Its size is approx. 110MiB, yet it allows a lot of software to be used.
Olives whole point is to display how easy to use Linux may be, yet without losing any of the features required for heavy-duty work. Its also supposed to show various unusual new technologies, not widely known or accepted.
Please note that Olive was, partially, built as graduation work at SPSST Panska. Once presented, a release built specifically for school will be available upon personal request.
Main features:
Media
Olive features MPlayer for playing of your favourite movies. It plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, OGG/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, FLI, RM, NuppelVideo, Matroska files. You can also watch Theora, MPEG4 (DivX/XviD), Real Media, DVD, VideoCD, SVCD movies. MPlayer also supports various filters for better experience. Mencoder is bundled with MPlayer and it allows you to encode movies into virtually any of the formats mentioned above.
Although you can use MPlayer to play your music, theres also an application that was written just for that: Audacious. Audacious is a fork of Beep Media Player (now discontinued), which is in turn fork of the very famous XMMS. It supports various audio formats, including MPEG layer 1, 2, and 3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg FLAC, Musepack, WAV files and Windows Media, as well as many sequenced formats including MIDI, and a host of different module formats. In addition, Audacious uses Winamp-like skins (and supports Winamp "classic" skins), to provide a familiar and friendly user interface.
You can of course view photos and pictures using GQview, an intuitive image browser. It can generate thumbnails of your pictures, its capable of reading EXIF metadata, has advanced image search function and much more.
Internet
The Internet is part of everyday life for all of us; was it not for the Internet, you wouldnt be able to read this webpage. Olive features Mozilla Firefox web browser, currently the most common web browser used on Linux. For browsing in console, ELinks is a must-have. There is also Sylpheed e-mail client, small, fast and incredibly useful.
These days, Instant Messaging is a common part of our lives. Therefore, Olive sports GAIM2 (beta2) multi-protocol instant messaging client, which is compatibile with protocols such as ICQ, MSN Messenger,Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber or Gadu-Gadu. There is also a client dedicated solely to Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which is X-Chat. As usually, there are console alternatives, which would be CenterICQ and irssi.
You can use Kismet to look for Wi-Fi hotspots. Basic utilities such as telnet or ssh client and server (Dropbear, used in various embedded systems) are not missing as well.
General work
You can perform some elementary office work in Olive as well. Although its obvious that you wont be doing most of your office work on Olive, its quite reasonable to believe it can come in handy. Therefore, Olive has AbiWord word processor to allow you to read and write documents, in various languages, in various characters, without any problem.
AbiWord can also handle various document formats, which includes Microsoft Word or WordPerfect documents. You can also export your documents into HTML for further processing or publication. You can also read Adobe PDF format using Evince, a Gnome/GTK2 document viewer whose PDF backend is based on the Poppler library, which is based on the well-known XPDF. Utilities that allow you export of PDF documents into eg. HTML are also included.
System control
Considering the differences in approach to configuration in various distributions, it may be often hard to configure several things at yet another distribution, such as the X server or preferences of software alternatives. Therefore, Olive features a trivial control panel, allowing any application to be merged in as a new panel. Although it still misses few more desired panels (most notable for network configuration), it already is quite useful for every day usage.
Eye candy
Good-looking environment always helps users to better orientate on the workplace, as well as consider the time they spend with the system more enjoyable. Transparency can be achieved using XComposite extension and xcompmgr + transset.
Though XGL and AIGLX were considered, the decision was made not to use them for their lack of testing and for the demand for support of as many platforms as possible. Please note that even XComposite may have its own issues with other software, most notably Enlightenment and MPlayer, and for this reason xcompmgr is not run by default.
Lightweight
If you consider the above features way too much for you and strive for something lighter, then you can use the FluxBox window manager. FluxBox was finetuned to look and feel as much as Enlightenment as possible, making the transition simple. There are also lightweight versions of some of the software, as mentioned above, such as irssi, CenterICQ or ELinks.
Enhancements:
- A significant bug was found in v0.1, causing ramdisk for people who have 1GiB of RAM or more broken. Please, upgrade to 0.2.