Hello everyone,

This is a somewhat general hardware question; every now and then, when I want to try a new distribution on my Dell Inspiron 1545, I run into this problem where my speakers start emitting this extremely high-pitched tone.

I mean, on the verge of my ears bleeding.

This only tends to happen with distros that have nice, shiny, GUI installers. So far the following distros have done this to me: Fedora, openSuSE, Ubuntu and - technically not a Linux distribution - OpenSolaris.

I figure this starts to happen when it attempts to load the audio driver.

My question is, is there some parameter I can pass to the installer's kernel to tell it to not probe-and-load the sound card drivers?

I only ask, because I have recently been doing some "market research" for work and have become quite in like of OpenSolaris. I, sadly, don't have a work computer I can try this out on, and my only non-work computer that isn't my laptop, is a clunker (OpenSolaris installed fine on it, but its slooooow).

Are you sure the sound is coming from the speakers? It might be something in the graphics drivers that some of these install routines use. You would have to check each distro but most have some boot option to use a text mode installation routine rather than the default graphical one. I would give that a try and see if the problem persists.

I'm pretty sure it's the speakers. Unfortunately, I have tried doing it with text-mode on the installers for the distros that do this, but no luck. Without fail, a message along the lines of, "Probing devices..." in any effect will be written to the screen and the screeching commences.

Actually, I am at a conference right now and no-one around seems to know what to do. One guy had a similar problem (yet, slightly different) with his laptop and he was able to remedy it by plugging in a set of headphones. Trying this, in my case, did not help anything. It changed the screeching from a ~20kHz whine by dropping it a couple of octaves, and that's about it. The noise was still loud and really obnoxious.

Google searching has resulted in nothing but hard drive and fan errors. The thing is, this doesn't happen in Ubuntu (which I am currently running on the laptop). Oddly enough, it also does not do this when I install OpenSolaris (or openSuSE, Fedora, etc.) in VirtualBox.