While blacklisting the pcspkr device is certainly an improvement over the current behavior, I wouldn't go as far as to call it a "solution that works just fine," unless a replacement is provided for the system beep. If we do blacklist the pcspkr by default, we need to ensure that Gnome/Compiz is configured by default to visually flash when a program tries to activate a system beep. Simply losing the alerts is not acceptable. However, it seems to me like it would take only a few lines of code at most to trigger the Gnome Alert sound whenever a program tries to activate the system beep. That being said, I am not very familiar with Linux/Gnome programming, so it could be substantially more complicated.
This is an issue that should have been fixed long ago, but it seems to have been overlooked.
While blacklisting the pcspkr device is certainly an improvement over the current behavior, I wouldn't go as far as to call it a "solution that works just fine," unless a replacement is provided for the system beep. If we do blacklist the pcspkr by default, we need to ensure that Gnome/Compiz is configured by default to visually flash when a program tries to activate a system beep. Simply losing the alerts is not acceptable. However, it seems to me like it would take only a few lines of code at most to trigger the Gnome Alert sound whenever a program tries to activate the system beep. That being said, I am not very familiar with Linux/Gnome programming, so it could be substantially more complicated.
This is an issue that should have been fixed long ago, but it seems to have been overlooked.