How do I ring a bell?

Frank Leonhardt frank2 at fjl.co.uk
Mon Oct 7 12:01:07 UTC 2013


In the good'ol days I could make UNIX ring a bell (literally) by sending 
\a to the console TTY (an ASR33 in my case). Now there's an electronic 
synthesised ting or beep from an terminal emulator IF it's got a sound 
card and so on, and an IBM-PC had a beep routine in the BIOS.

Is there any way to make a noise through the built in "bell" speaker 
found on an IBM PC compatible server box? Writing 007 to the BIOS cout 
routine might do it, but I've realised I haven't got a clue how to do that.

I could easily knock up a bit of hardware to go on a serial port (or 
similar) that could be triggered to make a noise, but these things have 
already got the hardware built in and I'm looking to use what I've 
already got.

Thanks, Frank.

P.S. "cdcontrol -f /dev/mycdrom eject" is the best I've come up with so 
far for getting attention.



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