On 2017-05-07 18:44, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
On Sunday 2017-05-07 18:24, Per Jessen wrote:
Wow, I had no idea people were so attached to the PC speaker! :) Is the PC speaker really relevant to userland today in 2017? Honest question, not being passive-aggressive!
Hardware is long-lived, and some hardware have no other (controllable) sound emitter.
It has nothing to do with long-livedness -- it just makes a damn lot of sense from an economic POV. A "real" soundcard is like 13× the price of a 1-bit mainboard speaker because of all the logic chips, occupies a precious PCI slot in your 1RU server, and you still don't have speaker boxes to hear beeps (or soft PCM bells)...
And because €0.50 (less than that!) is cheap for a 1-bit speaker, you just get them for free even with new hardware as a handy debug aid in the pre-boot phase.
I have a mini PC from MSI, a Cubi N. Doesn't beep. The box is so small that probably adding that tiny hardware is too much. I don't even know if there are pins for it, but I'm not going to open it for checking any time soon... -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 42.2 x86_64 "Malachite" at Telcontar)