How to disable Alert volume from the command line?

There is an option in the Sound Preferences dialog, Sound Effects tab, to toggle Alert volume 'mute'. It works and suffices for my needs to disable the irritating system beep/bell.

However, I reinstall systems a LOT for testing purposes and would like to set this setting in a shell script so it's off without having to fiddle with a GUI. But for the life of me I can't seem to find where this can be toggled via a command line tool.

I've scanned through gconf-editor, pulseaudio's pacmd, grepped through /etc, even dug through the gnome-volume-control source code, but I am not seeing how this can be set.

I gather that gnome-volume-control has changed since a few releases ago.

Ideas?

Hunted for this for a long while. Especially since I do not use pulseaudio and I cannot mute the alert sound from the UI (WTF!?)

This does it. Oh the sweet joy of silence!

# gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.sound event-sounds false

• Option 0: (this might be what you were looking for)

  sudo su gdm -c "gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/sound/event_sounds --type bool false"
  

• Option 1:

  Temporary:

  sudo modprobe -r pcspkr  
  

  Permanent

  echo “blacklist pcspkr” >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
  

• Option 2:

  Search for "set bell-style" in /etc/inputrc (options are none or visible)

• Option 3:

  sudo mv -v /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/*.ogg {*.disabled}
  

• Option 4:

  man xset