Enable system beep in Ubuntu

Question

I have tried to get the system beep working, but with no success. I used echo -e '\a' and the beep application.

I have tried entering modprobe pcspkr at the command line, and made sure pcspkr is not listed on the modprobe blacklist. I also enabled

• from the Gnome Desktop: System → Sound → System Beep → Enable audible beep,
• from a Terminal window: Edit → General → Terminal bell.

This did not fix the issue, though.

My computer is an IBM Thinkpad, iSeries laptop. I know my hardware speaker works, because if on startup the battery is low, it will beep.

Answer 1

This might be a possible solution

What happens sometimes is the pcspkr might be added to blacklist, to remove it from the blacklist

Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and remove these lines if they exist : (NOTE: You need to edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf instead)

# get rid of system beep

blacklist pcspkr

Reboot to deactivate this line.To disable the speaker (that emits the beep), add these lines and reboot.

This might solve your problem. Can provide more information if we know the system details.

If that doesn't solve your problem try running sudo modprobe pcspkr .

Answer 2

My laptop doesn't have a PC speaker, so I needed a software-only solution. I found an article about setting up GNOME to play an audio file for the system beep.

The idea is to set up xkbevd(1) to run a command when a certain event occurs; in this case, the event Bell. For Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty (and possibly previous versions as well), many of the sound files provided are in ogg vorbis format instead of wave, so depending on which sound you want to play on a terminal bell, using aplay(1) may not work. If you don't already have it, you'll need to install the vorbis-tools package:

sudo aptitude install vorbis-tools

After that, you'll need to create ~/.xkb/xkbevd.cf (note the spelling, the article has a typo here) and insert the following:

soundDirectory="/usr/share/sounds/"
soundCmd="ogg123 -q"

Bell() "ubuntu/stereo/bell.ogg"

In order to have the daemon run on login, you can edit your profile as the article suggests, or you can add it to your Startup Applications (System -> Preferences ->Startup Applications). Click on Add to create a new startup program, set the Name to XKB Event Daemon, the command to xkbevd -bg, and the comment to Software terminal bell.

Answer 3

I had the same problem. For me, it was solved by opening "alsamixer" on the console and unmuting the "Beep" slider.

Answer 4

• Check if pcspkr module is currently loaded

  $ lsmod | grep pcspkr
  pcspkr 10496 0

• Check if there are any related errors in /var/log/dmesg

  $ sudo grep pcspkr /var/log/dmesg
  [ 15.620198] input: PC Speaker as /devices/platform/pcspkr/input/input8

If there's still no clue, do a full manual check of /var/log/dmesg for other errors. A quick grep of the other logs in /var/log/* with today's timestamp might also turn up something.

The above steps are just to help you narrow down the possible issue. With these kind of problems, it can be difficult to guess the answer right off the bat.

Answer 5

On Ubuntu 14.04 (and perhaps others), the module-x11-bell module tries to play a bell.ogg sample, which is not loaded in PulseAudio's sample cache. As a workaround to load it manually, type this in a terminal:

pactl upload-sample /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/bell.ogg bell.ogg

To make this permanent, add the above line inside .xprofile in your home directory (create it if it doesn't exist already).

This command will tell you whether the sample is loaded or not:

pactl list samples

Answer 6

Try this:

sudo modprobe pcspkr

Answer 7

First, you need to be sure the right module is loaded. If not, the sound control center won't do nothing AFAIK (and even if the module is loaded, I don't know if the bugs mentioned in this thread are solved in Jaunty).

What version of Ubuntu are you using? Prior to Jaunty, the module was name snd_pcspkr.

Can you give us the output of:

lsmod | grep pcspkr

Can you give us the output of:

grep pcspkr /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist*

BTW, pcspkr is blacklisted by default again in Karmic.

Answer 8

http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1315929

Post number 6 solved it for me. In short do the following in a terminal:

1. run 'alsamixer'
2. move to PC Beep
3. press m to unmute
4. set volume
5. press escape

Answer 9

I installed beep with:

sudo aptitude install beep

Now I can call beep from shell or script with

beep
beep -r 3

This program can do much more. See man beep.

Answer 10

For me the solution was a combination of the posts from Leo and nana.galvao:

• run alsamixer, unmute Beep and set a decent volume.
• sudo modprobe pcspkr
• and of course install the beep package with sudo apt-get install beep

Answer 11

The command beep didn't work for me so I came up with an own solution:

alias beep="mplayer -ao alsa $HOME/bin/alert.wav &>/dev/null"

Where alert.wav is a short audio file. Usage:

$ sleep 2; beep

See my blog post about it here.

Answer 12

I've been researching this problem for a week or so, and I've discovered one of the two machines that I wanted to make beep does not have a built in pc-speaker (weird). So check if there is one.