Comment 41 for bug 486154

Grondr, thanks for your exhaustive efforts to describe the many permutations of this bug. I have only one thing to add: On my 9.04 system, the system bell seems to work exactly as it did in previous versions. So I think what changed, changed between 9.04 and 9.10. Perhaps we need to start diff-ing the sources of potential suspects.

I still remain fairly convinced that this is a metacity problem. (Of course, I used to be fairly convinced that it was a pulse audio problem, so I won't feel slighted if you don't believe me. :) My reasoning is this: Once I've enabled the PC speaker, I can get the old behavior back by switching to compiz, and then go to bell.ogg by switching back to metacity. As I'm switching via the System | Preferences | Appearance | Visual Effects dialog, I'm not being logged in again and I'm not restarting Gnome. All that's happening (I think) is that metacity is being stopped and compiz is started in its place (and vice versa). So whatever is catching system bell events is being started and stopped with metacity. Maybe it's not within the metacity binary itself, but it seems to be tied tightly with the metacity window manager as a whole. That said, I have no explanation of the behavior you describe.

> How do we find an expert?

I'll try annoying the people over in #77010. But I'm not holding out much hope that that will help.