Willie Walker wrote: > Hi All: > > As part of the OpenSolaris accessible live CD and install work, we play > audible prompts (beeps) at the keyboard layout and language selection screens > presented during the boot of the live CD. These prompts allow blind people > to determine that they are being asked for input. When coupled with separate > written documentation, the user can then work their way through the boot and > install the system without sighted assistance. > > On *some* machines, notably this nice little Toshiba Portege R500 laptop in > my lap, the console beep doesn't seem to work. As a means for testing this, > I do an "svcadm disable gdm", login, and then type "/usr/bin/printf '\a'". I > know the beep *can* work -- if I press/hold the Escape key while powering the > machine on, I get a nice loud beep. > > Aside from being able to set the volume level of the beep (which I have set > to the loudest setting), I cannot see anything in the BIOS that lets me > enable/disable the system bell. I've also tried mucking with > /etc/kbd/default to no avail. > > I'm not sure if this is a hardware issue or a driver issue, and I'm wondering > if anyone has any ideas. > > Will > > PS - my next step is to boot a live CD from a different distribution (e.g., > Ubuntu) to see if it exhibits the same problem. >
For many laptops, the keyboard beep is routed through the audio codec. I'm not sure how exactly this works on audiohd platforms, but with ac'97 devices the BIOS writes into a specific register on the audio codec to cause the beep (generally setting the frequency of the beep, and then clearing it once the beep is complete.) It would not surprise me if the audiohd driver was doing something to disable the beep, or if the audiohd driver wasn't doing something it *needed* to do to keep the beep working. You might want to consider just playing an ordinary audio file instead of relying on the beep. -- Garrett
