Boot manager beep (revisited)

[John Baldwin]

On Monday 01 May 2006 08:22, Eric Anderson wrote:
> Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> > On 2006-05-01 03:29, Luigi Rizzo <rizzo at icir.org> wrote:
> >> On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 01:15:44PM +0300, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> >> ...
> >>> I'd certainly prefer it if the beep was turned *off* by default,
> >>> but I'm not sure if that's what everyone prefers.  This is why I
> >>> opted for keeping the current behavior and making my personal
> >>> preference an option :)
> >> i do prefer it off.
> >> and my laptop has no volume control available at boot.
> >> many new laptops have everything in software, which means
> >> very little controls available at boot time.
> > 
> > I know the feeling.  The lack of a control in my laptop was what
> > initially prompted me to look at ways to turn it off :)
> 
> Me too.  I have no way to turn it off in the BIOS.
> 
> Does having a beep at the boot prompt really help out those who are 
> visually impaired?  Seem that there are 100 other hurdles that would 
> make that pretty much useless in the end.  As far as headless booting, 
> the beep is nice, but could be an optional loader.conf tweak that 
> enables a kernel beep instead, right?  I have lots of headless machines, 
> and a beep is barely heard over the roar of thousands of hard drives and 
> many tens of tons of AC rumbling.
> 
> Maybe an alternate option is to compile both the beeping and a beepless 
> boot loader, and have the boot0cfg program install the right one 
> depending on a command line option?  Hmm.. Maybe that's too cheesy..

It used to only beep for invalid input, but when someone was adding
some other feature a while back they had to make the beep happen on
startup as well due to size constraints.  I'm not a fan of it either.

-- 
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org