I was reminded this week of something that I often show people but I have never actually written down in a post. This may be old news to some of you, but when has that stopped me in the past!?
Now I should preface this with a warning that my boss pointed out to me. He says “the system beeps for a reason–it’s trying to tell you something–you should leave it on.” Now that is out of the way I’ll go ahead with how to disable the PC Speaker, which removes the often annoying beeps. It should be mentioned that this should work on any distribution, and is not Ubuntu specific.
Removing the driver
The system speaker is controlled by a driver in the Linux kernel. This allows the pc speaker to beep at you for different reasons or at different events. If you remove the module which drives the speaker, the beeping goes away, as the machine no longer knows how to interface with that device.
This can be done manually with a command such as:
sudo modprobe -r pcspkr
or you can set it as a persistent change by adding the module to your system driver blacklist, available at:
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
simply append the line “blacklist pcspkr” for that driver to be disregarded at every boot.
If you’d like to manually re-insert the module use:
sudo modprobe pcspkr
Enjoy the quiet!
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