Bug 340657 - globally turning off beep
globally turning off beep
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Classification: openSUSE
Product: openSUSE 11.0
Classification: openSUSE
Component: Kernel
Factory
x86-64 Other
: P5 - None : Enhancement with 10 votes (vote)
: Beta 3
Assigned To: Jiri Srain
Jiri Srain
:
Depends on:
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2007-11-09 17:38 UTC by Miklos Szeredi
Modified: 2009-03-04 17:04 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

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Description Miklos Szeredi 2007-11-09 17:38:30 UTC
On the ThinkPad notebook line, the system beep can be extremely loud (googling for 'thinkpad beep hearing' will conform this).

One suggestion to get rid of the beep is to remove the 'pcspkr' kernel module.  However this module is compiled into the SUSE kernels, so it cannot be removed.

Other suggested workarounds are:

 - add 'set bell-style none' to /etc/inputrc
 - add 'setterm -blength 0' to /etc/profile.local
 - xset b off

None of these are very user friendly.  So it would be nice to add a global knob to  YaST, possibly automatically turning off beep at install time for ThinkPads, or at least asking the user.
Comment 1 Martin Mrazik 2007-11-12 11:45:37 UTC
Please reassign to the YaST team if you think this should be solved at the yast level.
Comment 2 Ruediger Oertel 2008-01-08 17:39:48 UTC
yes, I think this should be done at YaST2 level, adding new
SuSEconfig scripts is "frowned upon" ...
Comment 3 John Anderson 2008-03-10 08:16:10 UTC
I would also love the ability to disable the beeping globally. This should definitely be compiled as a module. What is the reasoning behind building it into the kernel?
Comment 4 Thomas Meindl 2008-04-22 12:22:13 UTC
Any news on this topic?
Thanks
Comment 5 John Anderson 2008-05-19 01:01:41 UTC
I moved the product version to 11.0 since this still exists in factory.
Comment 6 Otso Rajala 2008-06-02 16:59:26 UTC
This is not only ThinkPad related problem, it's in every computer without possibility of turning off pc-speaker in BIOS. 
I agree that pcspkr would be better off as a kernel module than directly compiled on to kernel. It's very easy to just edit the file "blacklist" in /etc/modprobe.d/ in order to disable it. Afterwards it could be easily implemented to YaST, since assigning a new button would require a very simple script, something like this:
echo blacklist pcspkr > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

So if we'd take the first step in creating pcspkr as a separate kernel module, then further modifications regarding pcspkr functionality were easier to accomplish.
Comment 7 John Anderson 2008-06-02 21:09:43 UTC
Assigning to the kernel team instead of yast.
Comment 9 Andreas Gruenbacher 2008-10-06 07:38:27 UTC
CONFIG_INPUT_PCSPKR is m in the stable kernel, and partially m/y in the 11.0 kernel. I don't see a problem with setting it to m everywhere. Could you get that changed with Jiri though, please?
Comment 10 Hardy Heroin 2008-11-09 01:14:09 UTC
As per bug 225221 (https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=225221) this should be very easy, 'modprobe -r pcspkr' works now as suggested in comment #6 (https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=340657#c6). Perhaps it can be implemented now and included in the final release of openSUSE 11.1. Laptop owners all over the world will thank you for it and it will change the image of GNU/Linux for the better:

Before:
> "Why is computer bleeping like crazy all the time?"
< "..."
> "oh you're running Linux or something."
< "Yeah ..."
> "Seems very annoying, am I glad I'm running Windows."
< *sigh*
Comment 12 Jeff Mahoney 2009-03-04 17:04:20 UTC
Takashi changed CONFIG_INPUT_PCSPKR to =m on all configs last August. Closing as FIXED.