Disable Beeper on Linux

I find the occasional BEEEEP coming from my PC speaker extremely annoying. My irritation is amplified tenfold by the fact that my ThinkPad's speaker is very, VERY loud.

After playing Whack-a-Mole for some time, attempting to disable the audible bell in various environments, I decided to take more destructive action.

To temporarily disable the Clangy McBangy, run the following command in the terminal:

sudo rmmod pcspkr

To prevent the speaker from loading at boot, you can blacklist the module. Create or edit the file /etc/modprobe.d/nosound.conf (or any suitable name) and add the following line:

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Disable Touchpad When Typing

I often accidentally touched the touchpad while typing, which led to the unintended activation of various UI elements.

I generally dislike touchpads; they feel like a useless invention, much like touchscreens in cars.

After some searching, I found a useful utility that monitors keyboard activity and disables the touchpad while typing:

syndaemon

  syndaemon -i 1 -K -R -d -t -p /tmp/syndaemon.pid
  • -i - specifies the wait time after typing stops
  • -K - ignore modifier keys
  • -R - uses the XRecord extension to avoid keyboard polling
  • -d - daemon
  • -t - disables tapping and scrolling only
  • -p - creates a PID file

Since I use i3, I added the following to my i3 configuration:

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