Tuts4Tech

I Recently found the 'system sound' tab in gnome-sound-property grayed out my work around to this was to install the freedesktop sound theme.

1. Firstly remove gnome-audio

   sudo apt-get remove --purge gnome-audio

2. Remove all your old users gconf data related to system sounds

   sudo rm -rf /home/*/.gconf/desktop/gnome/sound

3. Install some needed packages

   sudo apt-get install libcanberra-gtk-module libcanberra-gtk0 libcanberra0 gnome-session-canberra build-essential fakeroot dpkg-dev intltool debhelper

4. Grab the source for freedesktop sound theme from git.debian.org

   wget -O freedesktop-sound-theme.tgz 'http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-maint/freedesktop-sound-theme.git;a=snapshot;h=c6773c0c08eeaab03c466dc015d36809dff537bf;sf=tgz'

5. Unpack and apply some small fixes

   tar xzf freedesktop-sound-theme.tgz
   cd freedesktop-sound-theme/debian
   sed -e 's:touch build:./configure --prefix=/usr \&\& $(MAKE) \&\& &:' rules > tmp; cp tmp rules
   sed -e 's:\*:&.ogg:' freedesktop-sound-theme.install > tmp; cp tmp freedesktop-sound-theme.install
   rm tmp
   cd ../

6. Build and install the package

   sudo dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
   cd ../
   dpkg -i freedesktop-sound-theme_0.2-1_i386.deb

7. Invoke gnome-sound-property and configure 'system sound'

   gnome-sound-property
   then you can select 'system sound' tab

8. Finally reboot your system and you should be good to go