Comment 29 for bug 486154

Robert: Thanks for the summary. I'm going to prepare a little table for the studio audience to try to make things clearer, especially since you correctly pointed out in comment #27 that there's ambiguity over whether I'm talking about bell.ogg or the squarewave beep coming out of line-out (whoops). I can probably get to that within the next 24 hours; if not, it'll happen maybe Sunday sometime. The idea is to summarize the motherboard & line-out behavior with and without the rmmod/modprobe fandango in an X-less console, in bare X (xinit), and in gnome/metacity. (I'm not going to try compiz unless someone thinks it's necessary; if I did that, I'd do it from a LiveCD to avoid potentially side-effecting my current Karmic install.)

Re the rmmod/modprobe fandango: I'm not the only person who needs to do this. In fact, it would never have occurred to me that it would even change the behavior if I hadn't seen it mentioned in bug #398161 (see comments #1 and #2 in this thread, where Philip asked if I'd tried that workaround). So it's clearly not just me. However, I hadn't realized you were testing on a laptop. I think that to really disentangle things, testers need to try this on a desktop, where you can tell absolutely where the sound is coming from, given that laptops seem to route what I'd call line-out directly to their onboard speaker unless you've got something plugged into the line-out connector---that muddies the water. On a desktop, my motherboard speaker is independent of whether I've got anything cabled into line-out, so I can differentiate conditions that I think you can't.

On a larger note, this might be a problem with Ubuntu in general on this issue---if most of the developers working on these subsystems do their work on laptops, they may not see the issue! Or at least, not all of it.

More tomorrow.