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Judah Wolf
Asked: 2015-03-10 20:56:17 +0800 CST

Insane creepy voices in Ubuntu [duplicate]

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This is the most insane glitch i've ever seen. My friend's Ubuntu 14.04 has started endlessly continuing a creepy, staticky voice that repeats words in english, mainly numbers like "one hundred one". It happens persistently and consistently, so I could capture a sound clip if anyone wants one. Some other weird things are happening too. BIOS is booting every time we restart when it didn't before, and also every time we muted or unmuted, thunderbird would start and ask if we wanted an account wit gandi.net. We removed thunderbird but that has had no effect on the other problems. Rebooting also has no effect, the talking starts at login. No programs are listed as running in the sidebar. I'm not super familiar with Ubuntu but it seems insane something like this could happen without any program asking for permission to start or anything. Seems kind of like virus symptoms i've seen on windows but isn't Linux immune to that kind of thing?

sound

2 Answers

  1. When the (computer) voices are speaking to you, type sudo lsof -t +D /dev/snd to get the PIDs of the processes using sound, then, ps -F -p <PID> ... to find out about the processes. Here is an example from my system while I was playing music intentionally, YMMV: 

    $ sudo lsof -t +D /dev/snd
1195
3713
$ ps -F -p 1195 -p 3713
UID        PID  PPID  C    SZ   RSS PSR STIME TTY          TIME CMD
lightdm   1195  1118  0 89240  2408   1 Mar08 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/pulseau
walt      3713  3379  0 110363 4100   0 Mar07 ?        00:01:07 /usr/bin/pulseau

    Once lsof tells you which PIDs are using sound, ps, kill, lsof, sudo /bin/ls -l /proc/<PID>, etc will tell you more.

    As always, do man <cmd> before you execute a command from Someone Else, especially if it is sudo cmd.

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  2. Best Answer

    You might check if your screen reader is enabled. This is a feature that reads the text on the screen for you in english. Its easy to enable this by accident because it has a shortcut that is ALT+Super+S.

    You can see if it is enabled if you go to

    • System settings
    • Universal Access
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