Christmas Carols

No, I'm not going to start singing now... Don't worry.

Actually, the topic has as much in common with Christmas as Linus Torvalds with the creation of Windows 7.

The bells I'm talking about aren't nice and festivous and remind you of childhood memories, warm stoves and a tree hung with shiny decor.

The bells I'm talking about remind you of your neighbour's annoying singing habit or your sister's first lessons on the violin.

They suck!

Big time.

(And unlike your sister, they won't get better over time...)

I'm talking about...

... the Linux PC speaker beep

A lot of Linux users know the problem:

You hit backspace in the console once too often -- it beeps.

You search something in Firefox and it doesn't get any hits -- it beeps.

You auto-complete in your bash -- it beeps.

Turning off, and off, and off...

But as annoying the problem is, as hard it can be to fix it.

First of all, there's a distinction between console beep and X beep, so you will have to turn off both.

Turning off console beep

In your ~/.inputrc, add the line

set bell-style none

and just to be sure, also add it to /etc/inputrc if that exists on your system.

Also ensure there are no other set bell-style options.

Turning off X beep

In your ~/.xinitrc, add the line

xset -b

and you should be set.

The loudspeaker beep

There is one more variant of the really annoying kind: The loudspeaker beep.

Normally, when a beep is produced, it will be created by the interal speaker of your PC, so you can hear it, even when no loudspeakers are attached.

But in some rare cases, the sound can be created by the loudspeakers of your PC, but ignoring any of your volume settings.

Happened to me -- almost drove me nuts.

The problem is, if you overdo it.

If you have the above settings enabled and remove the pcspkr module from your kernel (as some sites recommend you do), it might happen that your loudspeaker starts to beep.

In that case, you have at some point probably executed one of the following commands:

sudo modprobe -r pcspkr
sudo rmmod pcspkr

To remedy the situation, just reinsert the module:

sudo modprobe pcspkr

(If you have even blacklisted it, undo that.)

That should help remove all annoying beep sounds. Hopefully...