Re: How-to make grub play a sound when it asks a passphrase and/or in case of an issue.

[Didier Spaier]

Hi, thanks both for responding.

Le 04/02/2021 à 17:39, Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko a écrit :
> чт, 4 февр. 2021 г., 16:25 Lennart Sorensen 
> <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca <mailto:lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca>>:
>
>     On Wed, Feb 03, 2021 at 10:54:28PM -0800, Hanson Char wrote:
>      > I don't know if Grub currently has any sound or accessibility
>     support.  How
>      > about having a config option to send some ASCII bell characters
>     "\x07" to
>      > the terminal upon the events that you described?  That would make
>     a sound,
>      > but far from being a "tune".  Would such a simple solution be
>     good enough?
>
>     What terminal?  Might work for serial consoles but I suspect most people
>     are using VGA and grub has to implement that terminal itself and how to
>     play sound becomes very architecture specific.
>
> GRUB has following ways to play a sound:
> * Sending \x7 to terminal. If you use serial or BIOS terminal it will 
> work. With GFX terminal it will result in a character instead. Other 
> terminals the answer varies
> * Using play command you can play any sound but it works only on i386-pc 
> and uses speaker/PIT. Many systems don't have speakers or they are not 
> connected to motherboards
> * Using morse terminal. Same limitations as play command
> * Spkmodem. It's not intended for end-user sounds

A bit more context for Slint and blind folks among its users:

* Only x86_64 Arch is supported, but if I could handle it I'd like to 
support
  also Arm for the Pi, ad Debian or Arch for instance?
* Grub is installed using the i386-pc and x86-64-efi targets. Our 
package also
  include x86-64-emu, which allows our users to preview the GRUB menu 
before
  booting after installation or after a change in grub.cfg. This comes 
handy
  especially for blind users, thanks for this feature by the way.
* We play a tune at boot using the play command both in EFI and Legacy 
modes.
* I have no statistics to sustain this claim but I assume that most 
blind users
  take choose a machine with a PC Speaker, allowing to hear this tune.
* Out of the box we have GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT=console in 
/etc/default/GRUB. No
  fancy graphics (which also helps users with a low vision).

I understand that GRUB's scope is much wider in terms of targets and use 
cases
but permit me to speak on behalf of some of our users :-) I assume that the
bullets list above would not much differ for other accessible Linux
distributions, at least like Debian or Fedora, and maybe for other OS.

> There's no proper way to hook up sound to described events but there're 
> 2 workarounds:
> * Add \x7 to the messages, e.g. through using of .po/.mo translation
> * Use morse terminal.
> Proper implementation is a feature request

Please let me know if you need a more formal feature request using this 
list or
another channel and what it should include; in other words your requirements
for a request to be considered.

Thanks and best regards,
Didier

>     -- 
>     Len Sorensen