If you’re like me, you start getting real annoyed, real fast at the system beep that insists on beeping far to often. This system beep emits not from your laptop speakers, but from that deep, dank recesses of ancient pc technology that is a little speaker designed only to beep annoyingly. Short of ripping it out, here’s how to disable it.
You can disable this by editing a file and entering two simple lines.
gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
And then add:
#silly speaker beep
blacklist pcspkr
Save your file and the speaker beep will be gone when you reboot.
If you don’t want to wait until a reboot, simply type:
sudo rmmod pcspkr
Technorati Tags: arsgeek, pc speaker mute, annoying sound destroying tip
August 24th, 2006 at 3:49 am
Or you can just oulle the *ucking speaker cable out from your mb
August 24th, 2006 at 6:53 am
August 24th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
you should keep in mind that this beep can be useful (essential) for some ultimate debugging but personnally, for everday use, i unplugged it.
August 25th, 2006 at 9:32 am
thank for posting this - *very* helpful. system beep was driving me nuts.
August 28th, 2006 at 9:09 pm
Glad you all are enjoying this article.
geek out
October 11th, 2006 at 7:19 pm
Thank you! Every time my laptop system beep goes off I can hear it echo down the hall…
October 11th, 2006 at 7:58 pm
Heh… no problem!
October 15th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
hello arsgeek! do you know how to solve this problem to? On my lap-top, the speakers don’t mute when I plug in my headphones. I get sound on both!
October 16th, 2006 at 8:53 am
Hi KJ,
I’m not sure off the top of my head. What make and model is your laptop?
January 11th, 2007 at 6:54 am
and if the module is compiled to kernel ?
January 17th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
I’m having the same problem regarding my laptop speakers not muting when I plug in my headphones. Last week it was fine, but today it doesn’t work.
My laptop is a Fujitsu Lifebook (N6220) running XP.
Any help would be appreciated.
January 18th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Hey JHC, I’m not sure about XP machines - this tutorial was for linux.
A quick google seems to show that the system beep can be disabled on the BIOS:
Miscellaneous
Configurations
___
When selected, opens the Miscellaneous Configurations submenu to allow you to enable or dis-
able the power button, power button LED, the Wake Up On LAN feature, system beep, and
Instant MyMedia. (For systems with Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition installed, the
[Wake On USB Device] also appears here.
Check this pdf for more info:
http://www.fujitsu-pc-asia.com/uguide/bios/winter05/n6220_bios.pdf
January 20th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
JCH,
all you need to do is go to your Volume Control,
go to Switches and check “Headphone Jack Sense”
If that option is not available in your Switches,
go to Edit -> Preferences
to make it available
January 27th, 2007 at 3:43 am
Great tip This beep was so annoying. Thank you.
March 16th, 2007 at 10:31 am
Thanks ! A very nice addition to HowToGeek article !
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/disable-the-system-beep-on-ubuntu-edgy/
March 30th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
When I got my Dell XPS1710 with XP preinstalled it would beep like it was trying to perform some kind of sonic cleaning and there was No Way to Turn It Off. It would ignore everything. Finally I got it to shut up by disabling the (hidden) beep device.
Now I’ve installed Ubuntu on it and… GAH! I’m sorry, but what is the #¤% point of waking everyone within a 2 mile radius every time I press tab and there’s no completion? WTF?!
So thank you again for massively improving my life by giving me the knowledge to undo the unfathombly retarded default setting.
June 11th, 2007 at 5:24 am
Disable the annoying beep or bell on tab-completion, it’s easy:
Open up the file: /etc/inputrc
uncomment the following line or just place it in the file
set bell-style none
It’s that simple and now all users don’t have to hear the annoying beep anymore
It is much simpler than buggering about with modules and drivers.
(this works on Feisty too)
June 14th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
harry3~/downloads>cat ./nobeepshutdown.sh
#!/bin/bash
#to be run as root
#switch off system speaker and shutdown(halt) after $1 minutes (integer)
sudo rmmod pcspkr
sudo shutdown -h +${1:-20}
September 5th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Thanks for this. I hate that damn beep. Firefox was my last holdout.
September 10th, 2007 at 1:01 am
Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! aocgogocnsvh
September 30th, 2007 at 2:32 am
if in case we want to turn on how to do it?
October 4th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Thank you, you saved my day(s)
October 25th, 2007 at 9:00 am
to turn the beep back on:
remove “blacklist pcspkr” from /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
or modprobe pcspkr
October 26th, 2007 at 9:56 am
just what I needed, thanks!
October 31st, 2007 at 7:41 am
Yes, man. Thanks a lot for this hint. I’m egg-zactly the kind that gets “really tired, really fast”, of that annoying stupid beep.
December 24th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
Here’s another way to disable the annoying beep…
December 24th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
Here’s another way to disable the annoying beep: http://alain.giantdorks.org/quick-tip-turn-off-the-annoying-system-beep-in-ubuntu/
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:40 pm
I LOVE you!!
Thank you so much for the instructions, learned something valuable and got rid of that god forsaken beep.
January 4th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Wow. I er. . . love you too.
Glad I could help. This is by far one of the more followed articles on the site.
January 8th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Thanks, that was VERY annoying when doing searching a page in Iceweasel.
February 14th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
WooHoo! Having come over to Ubuntu from Gentoo, it was extremely annoying having that beep, especially because I use tab-completion all the time, and it would beep whenever there was more than one option. Thanks a ton!
February 20th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Thanks, this is a lifesaver during classes! It’s rather embarrassing to have your system start beeping loudly when you are supposed to be paying attention to a lecture.
February 29th, 2008 at 10:34 am
This was my #1 annoyance - thanks a ton!
March 30th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
To turn off the annoying System Beep in Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10.
Click APPLICATIONS > PREFERENCES > SOUND > SYSTEM BEEP. then uncheck ENABLE SYSTEM BEEP.
April 27th, 2008 at 7:01 am
Thanks, Denis! That’s a much nicer solution to the problem. Same instructions go for Ubuntu 8.04 as well.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Wow. You’d think no operating system other than Linux ever gave you that “annoying system beep”.
Psst…kid…it’s a PC thing.
It’s perfectly okay to be ignorant of things like economics and history, but if you’re going to look this clueless about computers, you might want to write for the New York Times instead.
July 7th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
I support Linux 100% but I feel that people should make an objective decision for themselves after reading The Truth about Linux.
July 7th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
you can also disable it from within Xwindows using “xset b off” this prevents X applications from beeping.
July 7th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
That’s fabulous. I googled for this solution a few years ago and couldn’t find it, so I ended up patching and recompiling my kernel to remove the beep. Patching was clearly the long way around the problem.
August 24th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
I hardly ever hear that beep! last time I heard it was when I shorted my RAM and the BIOS made the beep sound.
You shouldn’t disable it, I hardly hear it, its main function is to alert you of critical problems.
September 5th, 2008 at 6:08 am
Thanks for the info. I haven’t tried the blacklisting yet (not rebooted yet), but the “on-demand” method works (Ubuntu 8.04).
The beep WAS driving me crazy, especially in Vimperator, where is always beeped when it couldn’t match a regex I looked for with /.
October 17th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Hello. Thank you so much for bring this kind of useful (beep was about of blow my head off!!!)
October 26th, 2008 at 5:13 am
Thank you so much. I have been running the Ibex since alpha. Have never had this problem before, but this fixed it nicely.
November 25th, 2008 at 1:14 am
Thanks! That really really annoying
November 25th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Thank you
Great tips. After I just installed Debian…
November 25th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Thanks for this tip. I just did a clean install of Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop and it started beeping again, very loudly, which is annoying in meetings.
Previously in some version of Ubuntu there was a configuration screen where you could turn off the beep and enable flashing of the window instead. I wish I could find that again, but have wasted too much time on a really stupid problem. If anyone knows how to turn on the flashing, please let me know.
Thanks again!
November 28th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Thank you! Firefox can no longer use the system beep every time a ctrl + f search yields no results, and that is VERY good news!
December 15th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Thank you so much. Every time I change my GDM login screen, it would beep even when I unchecked it in my sound preferences. This works in Hardy if anyone is wondering.
December 18th, 2008 at 3:10 am
I’m so thankful to have found how to disable this — thank you for your article. I can’t tell you how many times that damn thing just makes me want to throw my computer across the room — it’s like it just nags you with that sound every time you do something just slightly imperfect. This tutorial is like a nice big fat roll of duct tape! Thanks!
December 27th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
thanks. its really works. good job keep it up.