/dev/speaker broken in 5.x?

[Ian Smith]

On Fri, 28 Apr 2006 10:14:34 -0500, Rick C. Petty wrote:

 > On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 03:36:32PM +1000, Ian Smith wrote:
 > > If this is not an appropriate topic for -multimedia, can someone please
 > > at least suggest where it might be on topic?  Is anyone able to confirm
 > > (or otherwise) the behaviour demonstrated below on a 5.x or 6.x system? 
 > 
 > I've confirmed this behavior on a 5.4 system.  It doesn't misbehave in
 > 6.0 or 6.1-RC1.  I haven't tried 5.5-* yet.

Thanks for the reports.  So I'm not nuts, just need another CVS hunt .. 

 > > This always worked fine in 4.5, and as far as I can tell from CVS, is 
 > > unchanged in 4-STABLE.  Since installing 5.4, I get the following always 
 > > repeatable symptoms when using the speaker device to play tunes, shown 
 > > here as root but it's just the same when run as a (wheel) user:
 > > 
 > > paqi# echo "T250L8CE-GE-C" > /dev/speaker  # works fine the 1st time ..
 > > paqi# fstat | grep speaker                 # but leaves speaker open ..
 > > root     csh         1919    4 /dev         72 crw-rw----  speaker  w
 > > root     fstat       1918    4 /dev         72 crw-rw----  speaker  w
 > > root     csh         1116    4 /dev         72 crw-rw----  speaker  w
 > > paqi# echo "T250L8CE-GE-C" > /dev/speaker  # no sound every 2nd time ..
 > > /dev/speaker: Device busy.
 > > paqi# fstat | grep speaker                 # but frees the device again,
 > > paqi# echo "T250L8CE-GE-C" > /dev/speaker  # to work again next time ..

 > What does the hypen do?  I can't seem to find it in the man page.

A flat, here E flat; find 'accidental sign' in man or /sys/i386/isa/spkr.c 

Cheers, Ian