[arch-general] Regression in PC Beep when updating to 2.6.30

[clemens fischer]

On Tue-2009/07/28-09:37 Roman Kyrylych wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 04:15, Flavio Costa wrote:
>
>> Muting the "PC Beep" in "alsamixer" mutes the beep, but the internel
>> speaker doesn't come back to life
>
> I think that is because of CONFIG_SND_HDA_INPUT_BEEP=y If it is really
> important to you - try rebuilding your kernel with the option turned
> off.

This can't be the end of the story!  There must be, or should be a way
to enable the PC-speaker.  I see that other distributions turn of
"CONFIG_SND_HDA_INPUT_BEEP" in .config, and IMO arch-linux should do the
same.  I do rely heavily on various sounds to indicate mail arrival,
completion of some task etc.

Meanwhile Takashi Iwai wrote in [1]:

  To avoid someone misunderstanding: the beep routed through HD-audio
  can also go to the built-in speaker.  It's just mixed up with the
  normal audio output, and the volume is controlled via ALSA mixer
  volume element.
  
  But, once after it's hooked up to the codec, the beep can't be output
  separately to the speaker.  It's always with other audio signal to the
  same output target.
  
  Or, on some systems (mostly laptops), the beep is hooked up to the
  codec automatically no matter whether you set
  CONFIG_SND_HDA_INPUT_BEEP once when the codec chip is initialized.
  So, the behavior depends pretty much on the hardware implementation.

So there must be a way to configure HDA to route beeps to the speaker,
but how is this done?  I remember HDA being able to wire specific sound
sources to specific jacks.  If you employ The Search Engine[2] you'll
see that there must be even another way using some asound.conf setting,
but again, I cannot find a definitive guide.

[1] <url:http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13651>
[2] <url:http://www.google.com/search?q=etc%2fasound.conf>


clemens