Wednesday 17 January 2007

disable the pcspkr - hacks

I blogged 5 days ago about the annoying beeper and different methods that were supposed to turn it off.

I asked for a clean solution, but I received suggestions for some hacks. Now I decided to make a new post since there was a comment added today and I remembered about a possible hack (dpkg-divert) I was thinking about.

Now here are some of those hacks and the reason behind rejecting them.

  • I thought at some point of using dpkg-divert, as opposed to deleting the module, but this is suboptimal. And I am not sure dpkg-divert would work for such a whacked "use case"
  • Using a hardware method is also suboptimal, for several reasons:
    • I will hear the beep if I don't plug in the dummy jack
    • the same goes when I am using a headset - the volume is loud and seems to not be affected by the general sound volume, so it would be disruptive and annoying while listening music and typing the wrong command;
    • the Intel HDA sound driver lacks headset jack detection in the current Debian kernel. This means there is no effect if I plug such a jack
  • The default beeping should be disabled by default, still, that would partly solve my problem. I could set that in my .inputrc file or system wide, still, that would mean a beep on some occasions (like gdm log in) - not sure if this would mean it would be more scarier, since it happens rarely or not :-)
Still, the question remains, why don't the originally proposed methods work, especially blacklisting?

Update: the headphones jack works with some small changes, bug submitted (#407252)