Re: PC speaker stopped working after upgrade to Squeeze
On Mon, 03 Oct 2011 23:24:35 +0100, Roger Lynn wrote:
> On 03/10/11 14:50, Camaleón wrote:
>> On Sun, 02 Oct 2011 22:04:09 +0100, Roger Lynn wrote:
>>> When I upgraded my Lenny AMD64 system to Squeeze earlier this year,
>>> the PC speaker (ie motherboard buzzer) stopped working.
>>
>> Are you using GNOME?
>
> No. I actually use KDE, but as this is a problem on console before KDE
> (or KDM) have been run, I don't think that should affect it. The KDE
> notifications are set to use the system bell and that works if the
> console bell is working.
Then I dunno.
This (→ no more beeps coming from system's board) was something commented
many times but AFAIK, it only affected GNOME based systems do to the
change at libcanberra's stack.
>> IIRC, beeper started to use "canberra" and associated libraries to play
>> motherboard's beep sound and so it outputs to PC speakers instead to
>> the boards one. Have you checked if the PC speaker output volume is at
>> high level?
>
> There is a beep entry in AlsaMixer, but it doesn't seem to do anything.
> There are no packages with "canberra" in the name installed.
KDE uses "phonom" and related libraries to hande sound system not
"canberra".
>>> Is that relevant?
>>
>> Relevant for what? :-?
>
> I quoted some text from dmesg about some sort of PCBeep device that I've
> never heard of. I wondered if it might have anything to do with my lack
> of a working bell.
I'd expect the problem would be in not having such device detected, but
not the contrary :-)
>> It means there is a PC Speaker device detected by the system, which is
>> fine.
>
> But it only works the second time. Could something be disabling it at
> boot, which is then overridden when I reload the module?
Then you mean pc speaker _works_ but you need to "reload" (i.e.,
"modprobe -r pcspkr && modprobe pcspkr") the module to get it working?
Anyway, you can check if the module is loaded when you boot by issuing
"lsmod | grep pcspkr".
>>> Is there any way I can get it to work from boot?
>>
>> You can get the module to be automatically loaded at booting by adding
>> the corresponding module (pcspkr) into "/etc/modules".
>
> pcspkr is already being loaded at boot.
Ouch!
> The problem is that it doesn't work until I remove it and load it
> again. Is adding a module which is already being loaded to /etc/modules
> really likely to make any difference?
I don't think so... but testing it won't hurt :-)
>>> Is this be a kernel or udev bug, or just a weird hardware / software
>>> configuration combination?
>>
>> Maybe a mix of them. I still have not clear why it works in some
>> computers and doesn't in others.
>
> It used to work on this one until Squeeze.
I'm also starting to think this could be something related to alsa or the
sound card settings. What's your sound card chipset?
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
Reply to: