I guess it is not easy to produce a series of sounds without
waiting each note to finish.  There is an 8 year old PC speaker
driver for BSD kernel that performs the BASIC PLAY lines in kernel.

Rather than porting it to Linux I chose a simple option of copying
the ioctl PC speaker code into a skeleton misc character device
driver.  As a result I can issue ioctl "beep" calls against my
/dev/pcspeaker (character device with major number 10, minor number
240).  E.g., replacing "/dev/console" with "/dev/pcspeaker" in
PCMCIA cardmgr.c will revive its sound effects.

Please pardon my ignorance in kernel linking.  I don't know how to
refer to the existing _kd_mksound() code from the loadable module.
So I just cut and pasted the code from vt.c.

Ilguiz

From: Steven Hanley (sjh@wibble.net)
Date: Thu Jun 01 2000 - 23:36:57 EST
[...]
 > Basically the pc speaker access from userspace is tied to having a
 > valid tty in the machine. When there is no tty in the computer the pc
 > speaker wont work. This of course means you need a video card in said
 > machine.
[...]