I'm having a beeping problem with NetBSD 1.4.1 on a Pentium, and no,
that's not self-censorship.  :-)

Two kinds of beeps work fine: a short high-pitched one that occurs
under the usual conditions (including "echo control-G" -- with the
real control-G there) when I am working on a console (such as
/dev/ttyE0 or /dev/ttyE1), and a slightly longer and lower one that
occurs under the usual conditions while I'm using X - for example,
"echo control-G" in an xterm, or a shell complaining at me.  I don't
know why those two beeps are different, though as I recall, one of
them can be changed with wsconsctl.  (Under NetBSD 1.2, all beeping
was of the lower-pitched kind.)  Anyway, no matter...

The problem occurs when I want to cause a beep on purpose from an "at"
job.  I used to be able to "echo control-G >> /dev/console" in NetBSD 1.2,
but now it no longer works -- I can no longer write to /dev/console as
a regular user, for starters, and writes to /dev/ttyE0 don't show up,
at least while I'm in X.  Writes (as root) of text to /dev/console do
show up in my xconsole, but bell characters have no effect.

In case it matters, I have a little script to set up reminders to
myself: the reminders are queued up with "at", and the script that
runs uses xmessage to pop up the text, and tries to cause a beep as
well.

How on earth do I beep this machine from a job with no tty?


Anne.
-- 
Ms. Anne Bennett, Senior Analyst, IITS, Concordia University, Montreal H3G 1M8
anne@alcor.concordia.ca                                        +1 514 848-7606