HOWTO:Turning off the beep

Latest revision as of 10:03, 24 November 2010

Pardus, like most other Linuxes, gives the user a warning beep via the PC-speaker when he or she does something wrong, like pressing an incorrect key. Examples of such behaviour are when your scroll through your command history in a terminal using the up and down arrow keys and you reach the end, or in the Find window in Firefox you type in a character sequence that cannot be found. Very annoying not say embarrasing if you are in the library!

So here's how to turn this beep off:

1. Open a terminal in Super User Mode: Pardus Menu -> Programs -> System -> More Applications -> Terminal Program - Super User Mode. Then, enter your root password.
2. Type: xset b off

There you are. No more beeps, neither in the terminal nor in any other program. The rest of your audio (music player, etc.) will continue to work as per normal.

However, after a reboot your beep will be right back. To make the beep go away forever, do the following:

1. Still in the Super User terminal, type: nano -w /etc/conf.d/local.start
2. Scroll down and add the following two lines:

       #Kill the annoying beep :-)
       xset b off

3. Press CTRL+X and answer Y to the question if the changes should be saved.

Notes

• "nano -w" tells nano not to wrap long lines. If you leave out the "-w", wrapped long lines may end up getting saved as individual lines.
• Anything placed in /etc/conf.d/local.start will be executed at system boot time under the authority of "root". So tread carefully here.