Getting the PC speaker to beep
- by broiyan
There has been much written on getting the beep sound from Ubuntu releases over the years. Example: fixing the beep
My needs are slightly different in that I do not want to ensure sound card beeps are functioning. Instead, I want PC speaker beeps, the kind produced by the original built-in speaker because I believe they will produce less CPU load. I have confirmed that my computer has the PC speaker by unplugging the external speakers and shutting down Ubuntu. At some point in the shutdown and restart process a beep is heard even though the external speakers have no power.
I have tried the following:
In /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, turn these lines into comments:
#blacklist snd_pcsp
#blacklist pcspkr
In .bashrc
/usr/bin/xset b on
/usr/bin/xset b 100
Enable in the gnome terminal: Edit Profile Prefs General Terminal Bell
Ensure no "mute" selections in: System Prefs Sound various tabs (uncheck them all).
Select "Enable window and button sounds" in: System Prefs Sound Sound Effects
In gconf-editor desktop gnome sound, select the three sound check boxes.
In gconf-editor apps metacity general select the audible bell check box.
Still I get no PC speaker beeps when I send code 7 to the console via my Java program or use
echo -e '\a'
on the bash command line. What else should I try?
Update Since my goal is to minimize load on the CPU, here is a comparison of elapsed times. Each test is for 100,000 iterations. Each variant was performed three times so three results are presented for each.
printwriter.format("%c", 7);
// 1.3 seconds, 1.5 seconds, 1.5 seconds
Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().beep();
// 0.8 seconds, 0.3 seconds, 0.5 seconds
try { Runtime.getRuntime().exec("beep"); } catch (IOException e) { }
// 10.3 seconds, 16.3 seconds, 11.4 seconds
These runs were done inside Eclipse so multiply by some value less than 1 for standalone execution. Unfortunately, Toolkit's beep is silent on my computer and so is code 7. The beep utility works but has the most cost.
