Monday, August 22, 2011

Stop the pc speaker beep or buzzer on opensuse 11.4

This is a collection of tips to stop your machine from beeping when causing an error in console-mode or when rebooting in gnome or even when pressing ctrl-alt-backspace to kill X...
Some changes require a reboot so don't forget.
  1. Remove the pcspkr module and stop it from loading

    go to a root terminal

    rmmod pcspkr
    echo "blacklist pcspkr" >> /etc/modprobe.d/50-blacklist.conf
    

  2. Set the console bell off

    go to a root terminal

    echo "/usr/bin/setterm -blength 0" >> /etc/init.d/boot.local
    

  3. Set the zapwarning option to off
    go to a root terminal and add the following section to /etc/X11/xorg.conf

    Section "ServerFlags"
      Option       "ZapWarning" "off"
    EndSection
    
  4. Mute the beep channel using alsamixer

    You do not need to be root for this. Just open a terminal and type:

    alsamixer
    

    You will see the mixer for pulseaudio, press F6 to change the soundcard.

Choose HDA Intel PCH and press Enter. Now you will see the BEEP channel


With the up/down arrows you can change the volume but setting it to 00 will not help. You have to MUTE the channel by pressing M, just like the following screenshot


I also fizzled with the /etc/init.d/halt script to remove some sound settings but this did not change anything, so I will not go into detail...