Thank you thank you thank you Grondr and Robert for giving some respite to people who are suffering from this horrible bug.

This problem is highly annoying to me. The initial reason for neutering the pc speaker was that besides it being "outdated" you had to grovel through 8 miles of innards to get it to be turned off. Unfortunately the solution resulted in no beep at all (so much for the "outdated" idea -- if it was outdated to have the pc speaker beep why didn't they make a configurable alert sound take over for it?). It also means you have to grovel through 8 miles of innards to get it back on again, and even then it's actually a sad string of hacks designed to turn it back on after the bits put in by the bell-killers turn it off.

When I first ran into this, I thought it was a resurrection of an xterm bug (in version 242, here:

http://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_243 

)that had plagued me in cygwin (which required me to recompile xterm for that platform), but no such luck.

By the way, two whole other sets of directions regarding the bell in ubuntu are here

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1377990

and 

here

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1377990

I've done everything in the Grondr's comment except for patching metacity, and everything in those two forum threads except for the bit about changing the bell sound. What I don't like is that I have to remember to do

xset b 100

every time I boot up because even though it's in my .xinitrc it doesn't happen. I've put it in my .profile, but that is a hack, and I still haven't rebooted yet to see if that will be sufficient. I should be able to configure the x bell with respect to x, using its init files.

What I have not explored yet, is the probability that the bell is still neutered with respect to the computer's state before X is launched, and regular consoles. Console beeps should work, or at least be configurable in some way.

What would be nice is if you could easily set this without having to grovel through all these places, and whatever you did to do it would undo the things that were done to neuter the bell rather than reacting to them. What would be even nicer is if you could set the bell sound, too. It appears that you can, if you dig deep enough, but at this stage I'm still trying to make sure I have the bell turned on in enough places, and I find more places that it is not and more places where my settings are ignored every day.

Applications that don't speak to sound mixers should be allowed to produce pc speaker beeps, as should the kernel itself. If we are going to try to intercept that, it should be in a way that ensures it will still work, and make both the interception and what we do with it configurable. Likewise, errors made in gui apps and other apps that can speak to the sound mixer should have a configurable sound.

I hope that anyone who is affected by this finds a solution that works for them. Expect to have to wrestle it awhile, and to have a frustrating time going through all these places. I did get my beep to work, I just have to keep turning it back on, and I still worry that there are situations in which the beep is still not happening when it should.

If we could find all the places where the bell was neutered and how, maybe we could make a better solution for undoing it or produce patches that either make it configurable or turn it on again.  Ubuntu being what it is, maybe gui configuration is the way to go.  But whatever we do needs to be compatible with legacy applications.