Update for Lucid, for which I'm sure everyone has been waiting with
bated breath.

pcspkr is still blacklisted.  See the above comment for details.

Metacity behaves the same way as it did in Karmic, trapping all system
bell events and using it's own playback capabilities.  This is despite
the fact that module-x11-bell is loaded by default now.  Someone should
write a patch for Metacity that would fix that.  Oh, wait.

Compiz still doesn't handle system bell events, but now Pulse Audio is set up 
to handle them, so we get nice-sounding bells in Compiz.  At least we would, if 
the Pulse Audio setup weren't completely broken.  In two separate ways:
1) Pulse Audio's module-x11-bell respects the X bell volume, which Gnome sets 
to 0 somewhere in its startup sequence.  (Metacity, of course, ignores this 
setting.  If it isn't in GConf, it doesn't exist.)  This was presumably done to 
shut off the PC speaker beep, but this isn't needed anymore.  The volume must 
be turned up before you could hear anything (`xset b on` or `xset b 
<percentage>`).
2) As loaded by default, module-x11-bell points to the sample bell.ogg, which 
doesn't exist!  You must either load the sample (`pactl upload-sample 
/usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/bell.ogg bell.ogg`) or reload the module with 
the sample name correctly set (`pactl unload-module <number of 
module-x11-bell>; pactl load-module module-x11-bell display=:0.0 
sample=bell-window-system`).
Now that it's working, you must realize the Gnome's Sound Preferences dialog, 
which assumes Metacity is running, no longer adjusts the beep sound.  
(Curiously, the mute button does work.)

But what we REALLY want isn't this high-falutin' boink sound -- we want
the PC speaker beep back!  When I check previously in the VM, Lucid's
Metacity could be patched in the same way Karmic's could.  I haven't
tried this on my actual machine, as Metacity keeps crashing on me (!?!).
But under Compiz, all you should have to do is load the pcspkr module,
use `xset b on` to turn up the volume, and unload the module-x11-bell
module from Pulse Audio.  This turns out not to work -- you also need to
start a new instance of Compiz, using `compiz --replace` i.e., for
reasons I can't begin to fathom.

This all probably warrants a new bug (or 12).  But maybe I'll wait for
Maverick, which promises to bring us two new window managers and a whole
host of ill-considered mis-configurations.  I hope you're all as excited
about this as I!

-- 
System beep broken in Karmic despite heroic efforts to fix it
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/486154
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