Freebsd – How to disable the system beep in FreeBSD 10.1

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How do I disable the system beep on the console in FreeBSD 10.1?

The recommended commands don't work.

The sysctl setting:

# sysctl hw.syscons.bell=0
hw.syscons.bell: 1 -> 0
# sysctl -a | grep bell
hw.syscons.bell: 0

Backspace still results in an ear splitting beep.

Found another suggestion, to use kbdcontrol:

# kbdcontrol -b off
#

Nope, still beeps.

My system details:

An old Gateway MD-78 series laptop (with Intel GM45 Express Chipset), without a hardware volume knob, and decidedly loud PC speaker volume.

I'm running FreeBSD 10.1.

# uname -a
FreeBSD raktop 10.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE #0 r274401: Tue Nov 11 21:02:49 UTC 2014     root@releng1.nyi.freebsd.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64

Update:

I'm running vt a.k.a. newcons, and eventually found that I could turn the beep off with:

kbdcontrol -b quiet.off

which can be put into /etc/rc.conf, to make the change permanent, as:

allscreens_kbdflags="-b quiet.off"

Best Answer

If you're running vt a.k.a. newcons, try:

kbdcontrol -b quiet.off

If that works, you can make it permanent in your /etc/rc.conf:

allscreens_kbdflags="-b quiet.off"

Background:

After running kbdcontrol from an Xterm and seeing it print out an escape sequence, I realized that it is just trying to send a command to the terminal emulation in the console driver, and it might need to be sending something different depending on the console driver; then I looked for and found the answer specific to newcons: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2014-April/049463.html

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