Comment 86 for bug 486154

Pete, thanks for the information.

To summarize what I now know....

There are several separate issues. One is the traditional square-wave
beep function. Many people say that it is necessary to:

  * Un-blacklist the pcspkr kernel module and load it.

However, I have just discovered that this module is not needed on a
Lenovo ThinkPad X61 for "echo 3 > /proc/acpi/ibm/beep" to work.
The latter requires only the thinkpad-acpi module.

Orthogonal to that issue is getting terminal and other bells to
play in the new way, via X, the window manager and pulseaudio.

For the terminal bell to ring, it is still necessary to:

  * enable "Terminal|Edit|Profile Preferences|General|Terminal bell"
  * set gconf setting "desktop|gnome|peripherals|keyboard|bell_mode"
    to "on".

Under natty compiz then the gconf setting
"apps | metacity | general | audible_bell" makes no difference.

Before receiving the tip from Pete Ashdown I was re-enabling the
compiz-managed newfangled audible bell by deselecting and selecting
System Settings|CompizConfig Settings Manager|General|Audible Bell.
This actually enabled the traditional square-wave bell!

But now I see that
  * pactl upload-sample /usr/share/sounds/gnome/default/alerts/glass.ogg bell.ogg
suffices to enable the newfangled bell.

After logging out and in the bell was still enabled without my having
to run xset, but I can imagine it may be necessary to run
  * xset b on
  * xset b 100
under some circumstances.