[Bug 486154] Re: System beep broken in Karmic despite heroic efforts to fix it

[Akkana Peck]

A lot of the discussion in this bug has to do with metacity and pulse, but for people who don't use gnome, metacity, pulse or any of that stuff, and just want their pcspkr module to beep when asked under lucid, I just posted a blog article:
http://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/kernel/pcspkr-lucid.html

Basically, I had to un-blacklist it in two places,
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and by removing the obsolete
/etc/modprobe.d/00local that some earlier ubuntu version had put there
and upgrades never removed.

-- 
System beep broken in Karmic despite heroic efforts to fix it
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/486154
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Status in The Metacity Window Manager: New
Status in “libcanberra” package in Ubuntu: New
Status in “metacity” package in Ubuntu: Triaged
Status in “pulseaudio” package in Ubuntu: Invalid

Bug description:
Between Jaunty and Karmic, a number of changes were made to keep the PC speaker from beeping.  As part of this, system bell events are now captured by metacity, which uses libcanberra to play a sound.  For users without speakers, this fails to be useful.  The current setup makes restoring the old behavior extremely difficult.

The absolute show stopper is that metacity traps audible system bell events.  This behavior is, as best we can tell, not configurable.  The attached patch keeps metacity from capturing system bell events.  It also removes the sound playback capability.  As Lucid will be using pulse audio's module-x11-bell to play sounds for system bell events, it is not necessary for this capability to be in metacity.  Additionally, this removes the discrepancy between metacity's and compiz's handling of system bell events.

There are several other difficulties in enabling the system bell:
1) Even if it is taken out of the blacklist, the pcspkr module may not load properly.  Another modprobe may be necessary to get it loaded.  See bug #398161.
2) Something in Gnome's startup does the equivalent of `xset b off`, so `xset b on` must be run on every login.  (Note that bug #280767 keeps you from setting the bell volume with xset.)
3) A number of settings in gnome-terminal and gconf may keep the shell from sounding system bell events.

Comments #28, #34, and #50 give more detailed summaries of the various problems.