Enable system beep in Ubuntu

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.

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 .

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.