Friendly Tech Ninja Linux how-to's for beginners

Howto: Fix Alert/System Beep in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

I was looking online for a recent bug that occurred after one of the Karmic updates, basically what happened was it started setting off my system speaker, this would occur when lets say you in the Terminal and your press the down arrow key, it doesn't do anything, but this sets the system beep off. Another example would be when your in gedit and you press backspace in a blank document, it's not actually deleting anything, but it sets off the system beep and is really annoying.

I did find one fix that works fairly well, which was basically to create a bash script that would turn off the system speaker when run, you'd then make it run that script on startup and you wouldn't have to worry about it any more (link at the bottom).

I did some more digging around and found a slightly better way in my opinion that involves using alsamixer. Here's how:

Step 1

Open up a Terminal and type:

sudo alsamixer

Now using your left/right arrow keys navigate over to PC Beep and press M on your keyboard, you'll see MM appear under the volume bar, this basically means it's been muted now press Esc to exit.

Step 2

Now run the command:

sudo alsactl store

This will basically save the changes you made.

That's it, pretty easy...you don't have to really muck about with bash scripts and the like, it just works.

However lets hope they fix the problem in the final release.

If you have any suggestion or question please leave a comment.

Link
Thread with startup fix and where I posted a link to this fix.

Related posts:

1. Howto: Install Dropbox on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Beta
2. Howto: Compile Chromium Browser on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala
3. Howto: Fix ATI Video Playback *UPDATE*
4. Howto: Fix ATI Video Playback
5. Howto: Fix Ubuntu 9.04 ATI Driver Issues