How to disable PC Spaker on Debian and Ubuntu
Linux
A
PC Speaker is helpful as it could be used as a tool for
diagnosing system hardware failures (different systems produce
different beep sequences depending on the machine BIOS type).
Using the instructions for the respective BIOS vendor and version
one could determine the type of problem experienced by a machine
based on the sequence and frequency of sounds produced by the
SPEAKER.
Lets say a hardware component on a server is down with no need for
a monitor or screen to be attached you can say precisely if it is
the hard drive, memory or fan malfunctioning...
Generally speaking historically
embedded PC Speaker was
inseparatable part of the Personal Computers, preceding the
soundblasters, now this is changing but for compitability sake many
comp equipment vendors still produce machines with pc-speaker
in.
Some newer machines (mostly laptops) are factory produced with no
PC-SPEAKER component anymore.
For those who don't know what is
PC SPEAKER, it is a
hardware device capable of emitting very simple short beep sounds
at certain system occasions.
Talking about PC-Speaker, it reminds me of the old computer days,
where we used pc-speakers to play music in DOS quite
frequently.
It was wide practice across my friends and myself to use the
pc-speaker to play Axel Folly and other mod files because we
couldn't afford to pay 150$ for a sound cards. Playing a song over
pc-speaker is quite a nice thing and it will be a nice thing if
someone writes a program to be able to play songs on Linux via the
pc-speaker for the sake of experiment.
As of time of writting, I don't know of any application capable of
playing music files via the pc-speaker if one knows of something
like this please, drop me a comment..
As long as it is used for hardware failure diagnosis the speaker is
useful, however there are too many occasions where its just
creating useless annoying sounds.
For instance whether one uses a GUI terminal or console typing
commands and hits multiple times backspace to delete a mistyped
command. The result is just irritating beeps, which could be quite
disturbing for other people in the room (for example if you use
Linux as Desktop in heterogeneous OS office).
When this "unplanned" glitchering beeps are experienced 100+ times
a day you really want to break the computer, as well as your
collegues are starting to get mad (if not using their headphones)
:)
Hence you need sometimes to
turn off the pc-speaker to save
some nerves.
Here is how this is done on major Linux distros.
On Debian and most other distros, the
PC SPEAKER is
controlled by a kernel module, so to disable communication with the
speaker you have to remove the kernel module.
On
Debian and
Fedora disabling pcspeaker is done
with:
# modprobe -r pcspkr
Then to permanently disable load of the
pcspkr module on
system boot:
debian:~# echo 'blacklist pcspkr' >>
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
On Ubuntu to disable load on boot
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist,
file should be used:
ubuntu:~# echo 'blacklist pcspkr' >>
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
Well that's all folks
...