Qubes 4.2 AGONIZING BELL IN RESCUE

User Support
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I just received a Dell Precision 7730 and I was excited to get it running Qubes, but I gotta say this ABSOLUTELY FREAKIN’ RIDICULOUS TURN THE VOLUME UP OVER 9,000 BEEP ON EVERY LITTLE THING IN RESCUE MODE MAKES ME WANT TO JUST SWITCH BACK TO UBUNTU BUDGIE.

SERIOUSLY!!!

I WAS TRYING TO GET IT RUNNING AROUND MIDNIGHT AND HAD TO QUIT FOR FEAR OF ANTAGONIZING MY NEIGHBORS!!!

YOU CAN’T DEAD END IT BY PLUGGING SOMETHING INTO THE 3.5MM JACK THE VOLUME CONTROLS DON’T WORK AARGGGGGGG!!!

All kidding aside, this is offensive to the level of my losing interest in putting Qubes on this machine. Who thought this was a good idea? How were they finally removed from the development team?

And most importantly, how does one disable this awful misfeature?

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[irrelevant comment retracted]

1 Like
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The problem I was having is that this occurs during an attempt to Rescue an installation. So this would need to be done within the Qubes 4.2 install media itself, which seems to me to be an extraordinary amount of work for which should be a simple problem.

I got fed up and did a reinstall using the file system defaults instead of specifying btrfs. This appears to be on its way to creating a working system.

Part of the reason I picked the Precision 7730 was the presence of four NVMe slots. My workstation has a mirrored pair of 1TB drives and a 5TB for large data sets that are backed up elsewhere. I want to reproduce that degree of data availability in this laptop, so I can leave the heavy, noisy #2 workstation in the closet. That won’t happen if I’m stuck with just the default install.

I try to be patient and cheerful when it comes to Qubes, since it’s such an extraordinary advance from a relatively small team, but this beep is akin to a physical assault for me. If I’m cringing hard enough to aggravate a thirty year old whiplash injury, my patience goes to zero in short order.

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[irrelevant comment retracted]

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Does beep of pc speaker has volume that can be changed by OS/software? What with pc speaker beeps in EFI/BIOS, are those also as loud?

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There is no way to disable the beep anywhere in BIOS.

There is no physical STFU switch on the machine.

Plugging something into the 3.5mm jack does not interdict the sound.

I’ve tried a couple permutations of the BIOS settings for the sound control functions, none of them make the slightest difference in rescue mode.

I managed to get Qubes installed with the default file system settings and there’s no problematic beep there.

Given the specs this machine should be pure pleasure for Qubes duty, but thus far it’s just been a big fat headache.

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Did you try to change the rescue kernel’s parameters, adding: module_blacklist=pcspkr ?

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I have not tried that yet. I needed to get working on the system, so I accepted all the default and the install worked. The issue I was having arose during attempts to use btrfs for the storage format.

The machine arrived with 1TB of NVMe storage but it’s got four NVMe slots. I can pull the six cell battery and replace it with a four cell that allows the use of a 2.5" drive. Later this year I may do something like:

Seagate IronWolf 525 500GB NVMe SSD for boot/root/etc.

Pair of cheap consumer NVMe I abuse for testing purposes for cache.

5TB Seagate BarraCuda for volume storage.

But I’m not 100% on this plan. Anything on this system will be rsync to a spindle in my desktop and my off site storage. I cringe at the $180 price tag, but perhaps the best thing would be a Western Digital Red SN700 - 2TB of NAS grade NVMe storage.

The Dell Precision 7730 is a game changer for me - it’s not just advertised as a workstation replacement, it literally offers 75% of what my workstation does, but in a package one sixth the size.