Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Disable AC adaptor beep in portables in Ubuntu 11.10

This is the answer to the million dollar question: disable the AC adapter / power cord beep in Acer Aspire One AO722 netbook in Ubuntu 11.10.

It is easy in Windows and perhaps earlier versions of Ubuntu.

In U11.10, you need the command line.  First bring up the terminal, e.g., use ctrl-alt-t.

Then use the utility
#alsamixer

For portables there are no separate system speakers for the system beep, therefore the desktop methods won't work.  For some portables, there are two devices, one for the digital HDMI and one for the analog speaker and headphones.  You have to pick the correct one for the volume settings.

For the AO722, use F6 to pick the conexant sound card, rather than the first HDMI sound card.

Then use the arrow keys to get to the beep column.  Type m to toggle the muting status.

The heart attack beep will be off when the power cord is attached or removed.  But the beep is not altogether muted.  The beep volume seemed to be coupled to the master volume or the alert volume.  

7 comments:

Merlin Arias said...

Thank you!

verdu said...

yes! thankyou!

ColinM said...

Great M makes the beep go away completely for a few power cord plug and unplug cycles and then it is back but at least it is much more quiet.

The Player said...

Yes, it could come back or still be there. But the volume can be set at the OS level like system alert at settings.

Display name said...

Thank you so much. I've put up with this beep ever since I got it. I was hoping Acer would put out a BIOS update to disable it, but I guess they aren't that competent. This actually works!

The Player said...

Display, I doubt if Acer ever think that someone will install Ubuntu on it. They wouldn't care anyway.

Unknown said...

Thank you.


it works!!