Beeping coming from laptop

Framework Laptop 12
1

I’ve got a Framework 12, batch 5, running Bluefin[1]. For the last couple of days, when resuming from suspend, I get a notification something to the effect of “battery health check connection failure.” I can’t seem to get a screenshot of it— a little slow to the draw, I guess— and it doesn’t happen every time. I see a red :no_entry: sign over the battery indicator in the GNOME tray. It seems like the battery health check is failing, but maybe not because the battery is failing. I keep the laptop in Power Saver mode.

I don’t have any indication of degraded battery performance yet. What tests can I do to ensure this is not the case?

What’s a more than a little disconcerting is that I hear… beeping after this notification. It’s almost definitely not OS alert beeps. It sounds like a wristwatch alarm. It beeps around 8 times and stops. When it happened the first time, I thought it was another device on my dining room table. Then it happened again, shortly after I opened up my FW12, and I realized it was the laptop. What is beeping if not the OS?

  1. OS:

    $. /etc/os-release && echo ${PRETTY_NAME}
Bluefin (Version: gts-41.20250831 / FROM Fedora Silverblue 41)
    ↩︎
2

Likely the stylus battery, which people have discussed showing similar behavior on with KDE. The 12 exposes the stylus’s battery as a separate battery, but if its not hovering over the display, it can’t be read and is therefore unreachable. See this ACPI output:

Battery 0: Unknown, 0%, rate information unavailable
Battery 1: Discharging, 60%, 04:42:37 remaining

So, TL;DR, probably just a weird Gnome bug due to the FW12 exposing two batteries to the system, one of which is unreadable most of the time.

EDIT:

The beeping is still likely Gnome or maybe Bluefin being weird. To my knowledge the only noise makers on the FW12 are its speakers (see iFixit teardown and parts list on FW’s website), so like as not it’s the operating system giving an audio warning of “Something is wrong with the battery deal with it!”

1 Like
3

I think it’s a bug, the stylus’ battery shouldn’t be the first one identified by the system

4

No stylus here, so that’s out.

One thing I caught as I did an update and rebooted was this dialog:

Battery Health Charging Error - Please update polkit from extension settings under Installation
Battery Health Charging Error - Please update polkit from extension settings under Installation838×213 29.9 KB

I clicked this Settings button. A dialog popped up. Lo and behold, at the bottom sat this:

Battery Health Charging GNOME extension settings - Install privileges for this user
Battery Health Charging GNOME extension settings - Install privileges for this user844×454 21.2 KB

While this screenshot shows a button with Remove, it had a different word there, I think Update. I clicked, auth’d, and the red :no_entry: indicator was gone from the battery indicator in the GNOME tray.

I think this was a me thing and not a Framework thing, and raises the likelihood that the beeping was from the OS and not the hardware. Still, the beeping sounded like a piezoelectric speaker. I’d expect my OS to make its alert sound.

5

Use $upower -i $(upower -e | grep battery) to check the battery status in terminal. If that doesn’t output anything, boot a different distro on a live USB and use the same command. If the battery health shows warning, contact framework support for battery and/or mainboard(if the charging circuit is the problem) repair/replacement.

Disconnect the battery in BIOS, save and exit. Then open up the laptop and disconnect the battery from the mainboard very carefully. Visually observe whether the connection pins are bent

6

Battery stats look good to me:

upower -i $(upower -e | grep battery)
  native-path:          BAT1
  vendor:               ATC
  model:                FRANDZG
  serial:               2AFD
  power supply:         yes
  updated:              Sun 12 Oct 2025 01:13:36 PM EDT (7 seconds ago)
  has history:          yes
  has statistics:       yes
  battery
    present:             yes
    rechargeable:        yes
    state:               discharging
    warning-level:       none
    energy:              40.67 Wh
    energy-empty:        0 Wh
    energy-full:         51.1029 Wh
    energy-full-design:  49.7725 Wh
    energy-rate:         7.78389 W
    voltage:             12.418 V
    charge-cycles:       7
    time to empty:       5.2 hours
    percentage:          80%
    capacity:            100%
    technology:          lithium-ion
    icon-name:          'battery-full-symbolic'
  History (charge):
    1760289110  80.000  discharging
  History (rate):
    1760289216  7.784   discharging
    1760289186  9.418   discharging
    1760289156  6.757   discharging
    1760289146  0.000   discharging
    1760289120  5.287   discharging
    1760289110  0.000   discharging
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7

Interestingly enough, the beeps happened just now again after I’d opened the (suspended) laptop and then shut it without logging in. It did a few beeps and stopped. I reached for it and it did some more beeps.

Yesterday, I browsed the source of the Battery Health Charging GNOME Extension and couldn’t quickly find something wherein it would trigger a sound independent of throwing a system alert.

I think I’ve got two things ahead of me:

  1. Contact Framework support for information on the presence of a piezoelectric speaker and, if present, under what conditions might it trigger a beep.
  2. Try another distro temporarily—put that 256 GB storage expansion card to good use, I guess!— and see if it’s a hardware thing, a Linux thing, or a Bluefin thing.
8

It’s an extension, not something comes with stock GNOME? What’s the difference between power management on GNOME to this extension? Did you test without extension and using only GNOME

9

Hi Colin,

I have a Framework 13 and also experience electronic watch-like beeps sometimes. Only today I noticed it’s from my computer, just like you. I didn’t get the “Battery Health Charging Error”, so I couldn’t install anything.
Is your beeping-puzzle solved yet?

  • Bluefin (Version: gts-42.20251230)
  • Framework Laptop 13th Gen Intel Core
  • 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-1340P × 16
10

It hasn’t beeped in quite a long time, maybe six weeks. No change in usage pattern, charging location, etc. Same GNOME extension set installed, though newer versions may have been installed over time. I never got around to uninstalling the battery-related extensions.

1 Like
11

i5 on Fedora 43 here. Just got the beeps as well but no notification…
It beeped after I had it shut down 3 hours ago and just booted it up now. Battery charge limit is set to 80 which it was at and I don’t have a stylus.

12

Did you get beeps when the computer is switched off or volume is set to mute? If so, what’s the sound source?

13

I did not. It was just this one time immediately after startup. (Fedora 43 btw).