Comment 65 for bug 486154

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!