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Yan King Yin
Asked: 2017-06-19 01:16:02 +0800 CST

How to make Ubuntu beep (a few seconds) before suspend?

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I want the beep to alert me so that sometimes I can nudge the mouse a bit just to keep the system running. (I've set the inactivity time to be very short).

How can this be done?

I'm using Lubuntu 16.04 to be exact.

suspend

1 Answers

  1. First install beep package:

    sudo apt install beep

    Then load pcspkr module, by default pc speaker is not enable (module is not loaded):

    sudo modprobe pcspkr

    Now install xprintidle, it's a utility to print user's idle time.

    Finally we need a command to check if idle time was bigger than of X, runs beep:

    if [ `xprintidle` -ge 3000 ]; then beep; fi
    • 3000 means 3 second, e.g: if your system goes to sleep after 10 Minutes you should use something around "540000" (9 Min) so it is able to make a alert 1 Min before system goes to sleep.

    After all create a line in /etc/crontab to run this command every minute:

    * * * * *   username   if [ `xprintidle` -ge 540000 ]; then beep; fi
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