Pete, thanks for the information. To summarize what I now know....
There are several separate issues. One is the traditional square-wave beep function. Many people say that it is necessary to: * Un-blacklist the pcspkr kernel module and load it. However, I have just discovered that this module is not needed on a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 for "echo 3 > /proc/acpi/ibm/beep" to work. The latter requires only the thinkpad-acpi module. Orthogonal to that issue is getting terminal and other bells to play in the new way, via X, the window manager and pulseaudio. For the terminal bell to ring, it is still necessary to: * enable "Terminal|Edit|Profile Preferences|General|Terminal bell" * set gconf setting "desktop|gnome|peripherals|keyboard|bell_mode" to "on". Under natty compiz then the gconf setting "apps | metacity | general | audible_bell" makes no difference. Before receiving the tip from Pete Ashdown I was re-enabling the compiz-managed newfangled audible bell by deselecting and selecting System Settings|CompizConfig Settings Manager|General|Audible Bell. This actually enabled the traditional square-wave bell! But now I see that * pactl upload-sample /usr/share/sounds/gnome/default/alerts/glass.ogg bell.ogg suffices to enable the newfangled bell. After logging out and in the bell was still enabled without my having to run xset, but I can imagine it may be necessary to run * xset b on * xset b 100 under some circumstances. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Desktop Bugs, which is subscribed to metacity in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/486154 Title: System beep broken in Karmic despite heroic efforts to fix it -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs