How-To turn off beep from virtual console

1 minute read

Linux offers a great tool: Tab Completion. With tab completion, you can easily navigate through your filesystem, find command names you forgot the exact name and in general, save you a lot of typing.

The only annoying thing is that it usually comes with a horrible *beep* coming from your PC speaker whenever you press tab and there is ambiguity.

This tutorial will expose a radical way to get rid of this, but somehow different than unplugging the pc speaker 😉

People owning a Desktop box usually get around this beep simply by unplugging the PC speaker from the mother board, but when owning a laptop, you don’t really want to tear off you computer to unplug those “bloody wires”.

If lucky enough, alsamixer will let you either mute or lower the volume of the PC speaker. This is an easy way enough to get rid of the beep.

Else, you can get rid of the kernel module which is responsible of making the PC speaker beep.

pcspkr, this is the guy we are looking for here. So let’s get rid of it!

sudo rmmod pcspkr

And that’s it!! Go back to you virtual console (Ctrl-Alt-F1), tab around…. no sound :D.

Cool, but now, it would be quite handy to get this done on each reboot. To do so, we need to blacklist pcspkr module.

The place to blacklist modules is /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, so open and edit this file and add at the end of the file:

blacklist pcspkr

That’s it, no more beep beep beeep going around.

Hope this will help handle your virtual console in a greater way 😉