Re: keyboard bell

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, Chris Murray wrote:

> I am a new Linux user and have a suggestion-- I hope this is the proper
> forum.  I recently installed RedHat 7.  I am very impressed with Linux
> and with Gnome.  I had a very frustrating experience, however, in trying
> to disable the keyboard bell.
> 
> I was annoyed with the beep that happened every time I used tab
> completion.  I looked for a way to disable it, to no avail.  I searched
> the web for things like "linux beep", "pc speaker off", etc.  I read the
> visual-bell-HOWTO, which did not help.  (The HOWTO suggests a
> speakerectomy, but I did not want to resort to that.)  Frustrated, I
> searched Usenet, the RedHat site, and linux.org documentation.  By this
> time I was on a mission.  I finally found the page at
> http://www.docs.cs.huji.ac.il/RedHat-6.1-guides/rhgsg/gccmm.htm , which
> shows the Gnome settings I needed.  But my Gnome Control Center did not
> have Keyboard Bell setting!  I searched the all through the Gnome
> documentation.  FINALLY, I found what I was looking for.  The keyboard
> bell settings had been moved to Peripherals!  I easily turned the bell
> off.
> 
> In my opinion, the PC speaker settings more properly belong under
> multimedia.  But if something is going to be changed like that, please
> make a note in the documentation!

Hi Chris,

I'm sorry to hear how much trouble this seemingly simple problem caused
you.  Indeed, finding the answer to simple questions with Linux is often
anything but simple.  It is the goal of GNOME to make doing things (and
learning how to do them) like setting the keyboard bell very easy.  I
think we have made a lot of progress here, but we clearly have a long way
to go.

As for finding the right document and the right place in that document, we
need several things:

1) a contents list - This is a list of the documents on your system sorted
by topic. This should make it much easier to find documents on a
particular topic.  We are aiming to have this done for GNOME 1.4 which
isn't too far off.

2) document indexes - This is what you always find in the back of books.  
It is a list of concepts and links to where the topic is discussed in the
manual.  We are aiming to have this in GNOME 2.0.

3) searching - There are a handful of ways you can search.  You can search
on metadata (eg. document subject or keywords), you can search on title,
you can search the body of a document.  As with the indexes, we do not
currently have searching, but we are planning to have it in GNOME 2.0.

These features, along with the ever growing body of GNOME documentation,
should help to make the "simple" problems as simple as they seem.

Thanks for the feedback.

Dan