 One of the most memorable features of operating systems of the past were the computer startup sounds. So these were the little 5-10 second audio sounds that were played as soon as you logged into your desktop. This happened on the older versions of Microsoft Windows. It happened on older Linux distributions, especially Ubuntu back in the day when you logged into the Ubuntu GNOME 2 desktop, it played a startup sound, and that was a really cool experience. The same thing with the old Apple computers, they had startup sounds, and many people kind of reminisce about that kind of stuff. Many people miss that. Even though the startup sound serves no real purpose, it has, functionally, it does nothing for you, it's just a nice aesthetic, it's a nice touch, and I'll be honest, I kind of miss it. And many people ask me about adding startup sounds to their Linux system. So today I want to show you a very easy way to add a startup sound, regardless of what Linux distribution you run, regardless of what desktop environment or window manager you run. Just follow this quick and easy little tutorial. So let me switch over to my desktop, and this is a virtual machine, this is an older virtual machine I had, and that's why there's 647 updates. This is running Arco Linux, this is an old version of DTOS, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to open with the menu Firefox, and what we're going to do is we are going to go to any website that offers free downloads of little audio clips. So in Google you could search for computer startup sounds or computer startup, NP3, etc. And find a site that will let you download short little computer startup sounds. In my case I found freesoundeffect.net, and you don't even need to sign up for an account or anything to download these sound effects. And here is one I found, let me play this for you. So very traditional, very traditional sounding computer startup sound. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to right click on the player here, and I'm going to choose save audio as, and I'm going to save it into my downloads directory. And then once you've found the little startup sound that you want to use, all you need to do is we need to make sure MPV is installed on the system. So let me open a terminal, let me zoom in here. So regardless of what Linux system you are on, MPV is often already installed because MPV is either the default movie player for most Linux distributions or it's a dependency for many movie players that are installed by default on Linux. But not always the case, but let me just double check. Where is MPV? If I do that, if MPV is installed, you should have the location of a binary. So that means MPV actually exists and you'll have some other configuration files, you'll have the location of the man page. So just do where is all one word, MPV. Now if it's not installed, all you're going to get is MPV colon and then nothing after the colon, right? That means MPV is not installed. So install MPV. Once MPV is installed, run the following command, MPV space dash dash no dash video, if I can spell it, space. And then the location to the file that you want to use as a startup sound. So let me do that there. And there you go. It plays that particular MP3 file using MPV within the no video flag, of course, means we don't get an MPV window to display because there's no video to MP3 anyway. So why do we need a graphical window? We don't, right? This is just a command line way to play an audio file with MPV. Now what I want to do now that I know the exact command I want to run on startup, I'm going to grab that. I'm going to copy it. So in a terminal, you can usually copy with control shift C for copy. And now let me close that. And then what I want to do is I want to open my Xmonad config file because in this particular case I'm using Xmonad as my window manager. Now Xmonad, like most tiling window managers, has a way to auto start programs. There'll be a auto start hook as part of your config, meaning there'll be a block of programs that get started as soon as Xmonad is launched. So let me go into .xmonad slash in my case, I'm going to do readme.org because my Xmonad config is actually an org document here. Let me zoom in and toward the top of my Xmonad config, I should have auto start. You see the startup hook and then I have a list of all these programs that are spawn or spawn once. So the spawn and spawn once in Xmonad that's launched the command. So when you spawn something, you launch it when you spawn once, meaning I just launch this one time if it's already running, don't launch it again. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and add a new spawn command. So I'm going to do spawn and let me paste that command. If it'll let me, it may not. I guess it didn't copy that over from the terminal. So let me just type it. So mpv dash no dash video space and then my home directory downloads and then that very lengthy file named mp3 and then the ending double quotes. Now if I did this correctly, let me write that and let me export the org document over to the Xmonad.hs, which is the proper config file that this gets written to. And if I did that correctly, we should be able to log out, log back in and hear this new startup sound. So let me quit out of Xmonad and log back in. There you go guys. So for those of you that miss a startup sound, that's very simple, very easy. Just go grab any mp3 off the internet, something short and sweet. And then with mpv dash dash no dash video, right? Add that to your startup hook for your desktop environment or window manager. If you want, you can go grab a whole bunch of free startup sounds. That way you have plenty to choose from. You could even create, you know, with a little bit of bash scripting, you know, like a demon you script or something, you know, that you could maybe select different startup sounds if you want to change or if you want to maybe have a random startup sound for every time you log in. That could get interesting as well, but I'm going to let you guys figure that out. Many times I do these little scripting exercises for you, but those of you that have been following the channel, I think you guys probably know a little bit about the command line enough to make this short and sweet little script yourself. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show. Evan Dustin Gabe James Maxim Matt Michael Mitchell Paul Scott West Allen Armoredragon Chuck Commander Rereadio Guy Dylan George Lee Lennox Ninja Marstrum Mike Erion Alexander Peace Archimvedor Polytech Realiteats for Lester Red Prophet Steven and Willie These Guys. They're my past year patrons. Over on Patreon without these guys. This quick little tutorial about computer startup sounds would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because without you guys, I couldn't do what I do. I depend on you guys. If you want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace. Short audio clips of Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman would be great for computer startup sounds.