Actually, I haven't had any trouble silencing the Dectalk PC. So, at least that isn't giving me any problems. As to the idea that it may be the CMOS clock, I don't think so. For one thing, Linux only uses the CMOS clock to initialize the time. After that, it runs on its own, essentially ignoring the CMOS clock until you shut down the system, or manually run the hwclock command. The exception is that supposedly, the kernel updates the CMOS clock every 11 minutes if NTPD is running and has declared the time to be syncronized. Most of this is discussed in the Clock Mini-howto. Speaking of the clock, do those weird messages show up if you compile enhanced RTC support into the kernel?
