No gnome terminal bell

bluethumb · 01-17-2006, 03:38 PM

It's fairly easy to turn off the gnome terminal bell. I'm frustrated trying to turn it on.

We have 4 boxes running RHEL or Scientific Linux. On 3 of them, the gnome terminal bell doesn't beep. On the other one it does. This may seem trivial, but some of the users are annoyed. They have come to depend on it as an alert signal. It appears that the terminal beep, unlike all the other sounds, is supposed to come from the internal speaker or perhaps a buzzer on the motherboard. (The KDE terminal beep seems to come through the sound card, but everybody likes gnome.)

I can try to activate it by preferences-->sound-->System Bell. There's a checkbox for "audible bell". On 3 machines nothing happens. On the other one it does what you would expect. The same window has a check box for a "visual bell". This works as expected. On all four machines /etc/inputrc has the line
#set bell-style none
already commented out.

These machines are all different hardware. Three of them are Dells of various ages: a Dimension L800CXE, a Precision 340, and a new Optiplex GX620. Only the GX620 beeps properly. I'm pretty sure all of these have internal speakers. The fourth box is custom-made with a Tyan motherboard. It came without an internal speaker, so I installed one and added the jumper to enable the beep, according to the motherboard manual. No luck. The BIOS has no setting for this.

I've run out of ideas. Does anyone have any fresh ones?

homey · 01-17-2006, 04:05 PM

I don't know about RHEL or Scientific Linux but it's not loaded by default in FC4.

Here are my notes:

Turn on system bell: Even when /etc/inputrc is commented out.
modprobe -l pcspkr
modprobe pcspkr
echo "pcspkr" >> /etc/modules
Note: Make sure the bell is enabled in terminal settings.

bluethumb · 01-17-2006, 05:11 PM

Hot dog. Thanks. Loading pcspkr does the job. For some reason that module is loaded automatically on the one machine that does beep. I haven't figured out why.

Now I'm stuck on a more elementary problem. How to make pcspkr load automatically at boot time. These modern unices (2.6 kernel) have updated modprobe and I can't figure out how to make it do what I want. I have added things to /etc/modprobe.conf: the bare name of the module (as suggested), an alias, and an install command. Nothing works. It's probably something simple, but I haven't found it yet.

homey · 01-17-2006, 05:38 PM

They may not all have the same kernel version.

Didn't this part make it load at boot?

echo "pcspkr" >> /etc/modules

bluethumb · 01-17-2006, 05:46 PM

Nope. I tried it, but /etc/modules is now ignored. The man pages for modprobe and modprobe.conf don't mention it. They say that the new, improved modprobe is so versatile that it can do anything.

Anyway, I had an idea. I put "modprobe pcspkr" into /etc/rc.local. That does the job. It's not as tidy as I would have liked, though.

homey · 01-17-2006, 08:25 PM

From man modprobe.conf , it would seem this line would work but, it doesn't ....
install pcspkr /sbin/modprobe

So, I got to looking around and saw a line in /etc/rcsysinit

Code:

# Load other user-defined modules
for file in /etc/sysconfig/modules/*.modules ; do
  [ -x $file ] && $file
done

So, I found a file in /etc/sysconfig/modules/ called udev-stw.modules .
Don't know if it's proper and what-not but, I just added it to the loop and she beeped at me on boot and nothing seems to have crashed.

Code:

#!/bin/sh
for i in nvram floppy parport_pc parport lp pcspkr ; do
        modprobe $i >/dev/null 2>&1
done

lsmod |grep pcspkr
pcspkr 3653 0

fleachy · 07-24-2008, 04:05 AM

Thanks for the quick resolution post!