Description of problem: My Dell T3500 Precision workstation came pre-installed with Red Hat EL 5.3 Client. After upgrading to the Red Hat EL 5.4 release kernel the system beep stopped working. I am talking about the beep sound from the built-in speaker, not the sound/audio system, which appears to be working fine. You normally hear the system beep when you try to "backspace" in a terminal window beyond the beginning of the command-line or type ctrl-g in emacs or run xkbbell. Some people people find it annoying, but I consider it useful feed-back. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.18-164.2.1.el5 How reproducible: Always. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot using previous Red Hat EL 5.3 kernel (kernel-2.6.18-128.el5). System beep works. 2. Boot using Red Hat EL 5.4 release kernel (kernel-2.6.18-164.2.1.el5). System beep no longer works. Additional info: lsmod reports the pcspkr module is loaded. I cannot find any error messages about pcspkr in /var/log/messages or dmesg.
Could you try the latest ALSA HDA 5.5 kernel found at http://people.redhat.com/~jkysela/RHEL5/ Please, report back test results. By the way, the HDA Beep can be completely disabled with "Beep" mute in alsamixer or any ALSA-aware mixer application in this update (Beep will be generated using internal PC speaker as in previous RHEL releases).
> Could you try the latest ALSA HDA 5.5 kernel found at > > http://people.redhat.com/~jkysela/RHEL5/ > > Please, report back test results. I installed kernel-2.6.18-171.el5.hda55x1.x86_64.rpm and I indeed got my beep back from the internal PC speaker. > By the way, the HDA Beep can be completely disabled with "Beep" mute in > alsamixer or any ALSA-aware mixer application in this update (Beep will be > generated using internal PC speaker as in previous RHEL releases). This is a really interesting tidbit I wasn't aware of previously. Thanks. I can now choose whether I want my beep via the internal PC speaker or the sound system. Also the pitch of the HDA Beep is now much more similar to the one from the internal PC speaker. I think all my beeping requirements are now satisfied :-)
Well, that's good. With that said, I am going to close this bz as a duplicate of bz525390. The fix will be in RHEL5.5. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 525390 ***