How to disable the pc speaker (beep!)

Get rid of the annoying beeps in Linux

Remove the pc speaker module "pcspkr"

Open a terminal and issue this command as root:

rmmod pcspkr

To prevent the "pcspkr" module from loading again at startup, open /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist with your favorite text editor (as root) and add following lines to the end of the file:

# disable the **** pc speaker
blacklist pcspkr

Re-enabling the pc speaker

Temporarily activate it by loading the module (run this from a terminal with root privileges):

modprobe pcspkr

If you don't want to prevent the module from loading during startup, delete the lines from /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist described in the previous section.

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