I can't quite reproduce your it-must-be-metacity results, because when -I- try compiz, I just lose X bells completely. BUT---metacity is -definitely- doing something wacky. Read on.
Starting from metacity, xkbbell (and rubout at an empty shell prompt) "work" in the same not-really-working manner as always. (And beep also "works", e.g., I hear it on the MB speaker if pcspkr is loaded and line- out otherwise.) Doing compiz --replace turns out to be a bad idea on my setup---almost all the time, I lose the ability to click on -anything- (including panel objects), I seem to have focus in no window at all (so typein is completely broken), and X logs errors about glibc corruption (double- frees & so forth). I have the logfiles, but that's some different bug I don't want to get distracted by now. (It also doesn't start jockey 'cause it's not automatically looking for drivers, etc.) I have to kill all compiz-related processes (some with -9) to get a window system back, whereupon doing metacity --replace works. (ssh is unaffected; this seems purely some X death, so I can fix things up via ssh from another machine). Going to Preferences -> Appearance -> Extra, on the other hand, does start up compiz without dumping backtraces into my .xsession-errors file. However, having done so, xkbbell (and rubout etc) are silent. beep still works. metacity --replace puts metacity back and gives me the same we-snarfed- your-X-bells behavior as always. Rebooting didn't change this. (I wondered if I'd screwed up some state trying compiz --replace a couple times and getting those assertion failures, etc, so I tried going back to metacity, then rebooting, then enabling compiz via the Prefs panel.) Since I'd been poking around in the metacity source, commenting out a thing or two, I figured that maybe my changes caused it to grab something in X and not let go, hence screwing up compiz. So I reinstalled the virgin package (essentially) via "apt-get source metacity; cd metacity-2.28.0; debuild -rfakeroot binary; cd ..; dpkg -i *.deb; killall metacity" and tried again. No change. I also tried rebooting at that point, just in case. Also no change. As long as I'm in compiz, no X bell. Once in metacity, X bell (as in, it's grabbing X bell events and playing bell.ogg at me). HOWEVER---I have inadvertently found another issue! I was doing most of my development on this in a root shell in Emacs, ssh'ed in from my stable Hoary (!) system (due to be replaced by Karmic as soon as this bug is squashed). In that shell, I typed "metacity" at the prompt. Whoops. It spit out "Window manager warning: Screen 0 on display "localhost:10.0" already has a window manager; try using the --replace option to replace the current window manager." AND KILLED THE X BELL ON THE HOARY MACHINE. I can't get it back. I'll have to boot, or at least restart X, which means the same thing in terms of losing all my state. I'm pissed off. I also tried this on a laptop running Dapper. ssh'ing into the test Karmic system and, as my normal, unprivileged user, trying to run metacity gave me errors, at about 1 Hz until I killed it, saying "Failed to contact configuration server: ..." etc. sudo bash on the same X connection (hence now in a root shell on the Karmic machine) and metacity stole that machine's X bell, too! Note at -at no time- was the machine with the actual X server (e.g., the display hardware) running as root; simply running metacity as root on the target (Karmic) system apparently caused it to say something to my local X server that broke the local bell. Hmm... (Presumably, there are tools that let one capture every X transaction in both directions, like an X version of ethereal, but I haven't looked for them and don't know what they are.) P.S. This bug still claims in its header and window title to be a Pulseaudio bug. I wonder if that's causing metacity people to ignore it. I'm tempted at this point to attempt to open this bug upstream, directly at metacity. -- System beep broken in Karmic despite heroic efforts to fix it https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/486154 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs