Disable your Internal Speaker's Beep in Linux
Linux has the annoying habit of beeping too much. And not using the normal speakers, it beeps with the speaker inside your PC. This can often be very loud. My Ubuntu installation beeps on the terminal, when it shuts down, and Firefox beeps when “Find in This Page…” fails. By blacklisting the module that controls the speaker, the beep can be silenced permanently.
[update] Mackenzie has pointed out in the comments that there’s an easier
way! Open System->Preferences->Sound and select the System Beep tab.
Uncheck the Enable system beep box. This will work only for your user and only
inside the GNOME desktop, which will be fine for most people. Use the Visual
system beep option and Compiz will nicely flash your windows or screen.
Open the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist as root in a text editor:
nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
Add this line to the end of the file:
blacklist pcspkr
The next time Linux boots up pcspkr will be blocked from loading and you will no longer hear the beep. Peace and quiet at last!
But if you only need a temporary solution to disable the beep, just run this command (as root): [update: “rmmod” is being deprecated, use “modprobe -r” instead.]
rmmod pcspkr
modprobe -r pcspkr
That will disable the speaker until the next reboot. If you want it on again run this (as root):
modprobe pcspkr
Archived Comments
Tom
Thanks Christer, I updated the post.
Mackenzie
Too much command line. System -> Preferences -> Sound -> System Beep -> Uncheck “Enable System Beep”
McPop
There can never be too much command line.
Anonymous
Thanks a lot for this.
Anonymous
There’s another way of accomplishing this task. Run the command `xset -b` to turn of the system beeping. Run the command `xset b` to turn it on again.
Anonymous
You just made my day!! I’ve been pestered by that stupid system beep and didn’t think I could disable. It’s awakened my husband more than once… bad for our relationship!
Thanks again! :)
Tim
Hey thanks for this! My wife plays muds using kildclient and whenever she
backspaces too many times on the input line it beeps the pc speaker. It gets
very annoying for both of us :) Using slackware all I’ve ever had to do to turn
off the speaker beep (it’s annoying in bash too) was edit /etc/inputrc and
change the line near the top to:
set bell-style none
Which always worked fine for me, but her mud client still kept on beeping after I changed it on her computer (she uses kubuntu). This did the trick nicely.
I’d never thought of just unloading or blacklisting the kernel module. And a quick check shows that in my newest install of slack 12.1 the module is also blacklisted to keep the beeps out. Thanks again :)
william
It works on Kubuntu 6.06 LTS. Thanks a lot :)
Anonymous
thanks that was a very useful simple command
Phil
Here’s what I did:
$ sudo vi /etc/inputrc
Remove the # in front of “set bell-style visible”
Now you get a flash in your terminal window instead of a bell, and that’s for all users.
Neike Taika-Tessaro
Yesssssss.
You’re now responsible for my current state of bliss.
Pada
My Ubuntu 9.04 doesn’t have a System Beep tab. To disable the Internal PC Speaker I had to go to the Sounds tab and uncheck the Play alert sound.
Dan
Hi,
and what to do when my laptop has no PC speaker and terrible beep I hear from
audio output (=loudspeakers)? I havent pcspkr module loaded, so rmmod cant help
me. I’ve tried “setterm -blength 0” but it works only in command line. Other
programs like kopete, gvim … beeps still. xset -b doesnt work. My system
OpenSuse 11.0+XFCE 4
Ubuntu 9.04
WARNING: All config files need .conf: /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, it will be ignored in a future release.
Victor
Check this website for an updated solution: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_disable_the_pcspeaker(beep!)
In my case (Ubuntu 10.04) the faulty module was snd_pcsp and not pcspkr
Thomas
Valuable post.
Debian squeeze apparently needs a second blacklist line:
blacklist pcspkr
blacklist snd_pcsp
Christer Edwards
rmmod is actually being deprecated. The suggested way to remove a module is ‘modprobe -r module’. Pretty common to still mention rmmod, but just a heads up.