CentOS and the annoying login BEEP!

CentOS (a Linux distribution based upon RedHat Enterprise Linux) has this rather annoying overuse of the PC speaker.  It beeps incredibly loudly when the login prompt is available, as well as whenever you do something within the operating system that it doesn’t care for.  It is noticeably excessive, however, is becomes rather embarrassing when you are in a room full of people and your computer is continuously beeping.

After searching for a solution on other sites, I tried the ‘blacklist’ solution.  This basically involves adding the ‘pcspkr’ kernel module to the blacklist file found in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.  This solution did not appear to work for me:  The obnoxiously loud BEEP continued to ring at the login prompt and attract unwanted attention.

If this blacklist solution doesn’t work for you, you can try mine.  My solution?  Simply remove the module manually at boot time.  To accomplish this, edit (as root) your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file and add the following line somewhere within:

modprobe -r pcspkr

It’s just that simple.  This command will remove (-r) the PC Speaker module (pcspkr) from the kernel during boot up, and you will no longer be bothered with the annoying login BEEP!