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?

3 Answers

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

I wrote a script that lets me adjust volume easily using the pacmd and pactl commands. Seems to work well when I'm using a GNOME desktop, (Wayland or Xorg), and it's working on RHEL/Fedora and Ubuntu so far. I haven't tried using it with other desktops/distros, or with surround sound systems, etc.

Drop it in your path, and run it without any values to see the current volume. Alternatively set the volume by passing it a percentage. A single value sets both speakers, two values will set left, and right separately. In theory you shouldn't use a value outside of 0%-200%, but the command will let you set the volume higher than 200%, which may harm your speakers, so be careful.

[~]# volume
L R
20% 20%
[~]# volume 100% 50%
[~]# volume
L R
100% 50%
[~]# volume 80%
[~]# volume
L R
80% 80% 

#!/bin/bash
[ ! -z "$1" ] && [ $# -eq 1 ] && export LVOL="$1" && export RVOL="$1"
[ ! -z "$1" ] && [ ! -z "$2" ] && [ $# -eq 2 ] && export LVOL="$1" && export RVOL="$2"
SINK=$(pacmd list-sinks | grep -e '* index:' | grep -Eo "[0-9]*$")
if [ -z "$LVOL" ] || [ -z "$RVOL" ]; then # pacmd list-sinks | grep -e '* index:' -A 20 | grep -e 'name:' -e '^\s*volume:.*\n' -e 'balance' --color=none printf "%-5s%-4s\n%-5s%-4s\n" "L" "R" $(pacmd list-sinks | grep -e '* index:' -A 20 | grep -e '^\s*volume:.*\n' --color=none | grep -Eo "[0-9]*%" | tr "\n" " " | sed "s/ $/\n/g") exit 0
elif [[ ! "$LVOL" =~ ^[0-9]*%$ ]] || [[ ! "$RVOL" =~ ^[0-9]*%$ ]]; then printf "The volume should specified as a percentage, from 0%% to 200%%.\n" exit 1
elif [ "$SINK" == "" ]; then printf "Unable to find the default sound output.\n" exit 1
fi
pactl -- set-sink-volume $SINK $LVOL $RVOL