How to enable shutdown sound on ubuntu 12.04

Question

I need a sound to play when I shutdown. In Kubuntu, there's shutdown sound. But Ubuntu, not anymore

Answer 1

The "most simple" way would be to automate this process with a small bash script.

First, you need to take care of some dependencies by installing the mpg123 package, which can play mp3 files from the command line. You should be able to find similar packages for .ogg files as well.

$ sudo apt-get install mpg123

Next, you have to create the actual script that'll play the shutdown sound: (hint, you can replace pico with gedit if you don't feel comfortable editing files in the terminal. You can name the file whatever you want, but make sure you keep the K99 part in front of the file name for processing priority reasons.

$ sudo pico /etc/init.d/K99shutdownsound.sh

here's the content of the script:

#!/bin/sh
## play shutdown sound
/usr/bin/mpg123 /path/to/your/shutdown.mp3

make it executable:

$ sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/K99shutdownsound.sh

Now you have to create a link from this script to /etc/rc0.d (where shutdown scripts go) and to /etc/rc6.d (where reboot scripts go)

$ sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/K99shutdownsound.sh /etc/rc0.d/K99shutdownsound.sh

$ sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/K99shutdownsound.sh /etc/rc6.d/K99shutdownsound.sh

And now you have a shutdown sound. Just make sure you're not going to play a 5 minute mp3 file, since the system won't halt until it finishes streaming the file.

Answer 2

What I used to do is have a file on my desktop called "Startup.sh" that would run a list of programs I like on startup. I discovered that when the last command in the list is playing a sound with mplayer it will do it right before shutdown OR logout. So, you need to download mplayer first: sudo apt-get install mplayer2

Then, make a file called "Startup.sh" on your desktop. The text of the file should read something like this:

#!/bin/bash
mplayer '[PATH TO SOUND FILE.extension]'

You just have to click that file every time you log in. You can add other startup programs you want to the script as well.