How to disable the pc speaker (beep!)

Get rid of the annoying beeps in Linux

Remove the pc speaker modules "pcspkr" and "snd_pcsp"

You might have only one of these modules in use, but they both enable beeps.

Open a terminal and issue this command as root:

# modprobe -r pcspkr snd_pcsp

To prevent the "pcspkr" and "snd_pcsp" modules from loading again at startup add them to modprobe's blacklist in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. You can do this with the following command:

# cat <<END >>/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
blacklist pcspkr
blacklist snd_pcsp
END

If this does not feel comfortable, you can also edit the aforementioned file with your favorite text editor and add the blacklist lines yourself.

Re-enabling the pc speaker

The speaker can be temporarily activated by loading either of the modules:

# modprobe pcspkr

or

# modprobe snd_pcsp

If you do not want to prevent the modules from loading during startup, delete the two blacklist lines mentioned in the previous section from /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.

Disable console beeps in /etc/inputrc

Another solution is to disable console beeps in /etc/inputrc (change with your favourite editor, should work on all distributions)

# do not bell on tab-completion
set bell-style none

Disable the system beep in Gnome

In Ubuntu 7.10 and later, uncheck:

System > Preferences > Sound > System Beep > Enable System Beep

Or if it's just the terminal tab auto-completion that's bothering you, uncheck:

Terminal > Edit > Current Profile > Terminal bell

Learning to love the beeps

Actually, these beeps are quite useful sometimes (especially with shell-scripts that want to get your attention with echo -e "\a" ). The reason people tend to hate them are because they get overused.

1. Make bash tab-completion less beepy, by editing /etc/inputrc (or ~/.inputrc). Add:

# Show all if ambigious.
set show-all-if-ambiguous on

This makes tab-completion more useful, as well as less irritating: we now only get a beep on a true error (no possible completions); if multiple options are possible, all are printed, and it doesn't beep.

2. Make the beep quieter, shorter, and a nicer pitch. I tend to set 440 Hz, 50ms. Configure with kcontrol (in KDE), or just use xset in your startup files:

xset b 50 440 50