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

Chris Halse Rogers raof at ubuntu.com
Thu Nov 25 02:00:43 UTC 2010


The patch looks sane to me (and I've mentioned as much on the upstream
bug), but as you've noted it will need some system-integration work to
avoid regressions for the people who want their bell to ding rather than
PC bleep.

To that end, I brought this up with Luke Yelavich (the main Ubuntu audio guy, TheMuso in #ubuntu-desktop):
...
<TheMuso> RAOF: As for audio this cycle, well I am not entirely sure. I think rodrigo_ is helping out some, and I am spending a little time on bits and pieces here and there, usually package updates, but thats about as far as I know.
<TheMuso> RAOF: IMO PC speaker stuff is disabled and should stay that way, and libcanberra is responsible for sound events.
<RAOF> So the correct way to proceed would be to teach libcanberra to optionally use the PC speaker, and teach compiz to use libcanberra?
<TheMuso> I'd say thats probably the best bet.
...

It would seem to be fairly easy to patch libcanberra to do this, and
probably similarly easy to patch compiz to use libcanberra.  Luke
(TheMuso on Ubuntu IRC, https://launchpad.net/~themuso has email
addresses) would be the person to talk to about this design.

-- 
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.






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