No system bell in X applications

Question

I have this application that when an alert box pops up it's supposed to ring the system bell. The behavior is preferred. I have a system bell if I run the command `echo -e "\a" > /dev/tty1` which will go to the PC Speaker. I expected and have always had that work. The problem I'm running into is the X bell.
No audio comes out at all but I'm using a program xbelld to redirect output to regular speakers because the system bell is to quiet in it's environment. This works fine in gvim, chromium-browser, and if I run xkbbell. If I run urxvt with the -vb switch, I'll have a visual bell but without the switch I have no bell at all. Basically what I'm saying there, is `echo -e "\a"` has no effect unless there's the visual bell is enabled but this is pointless as I need the sound.
It worked fine when the system ran Debian, but I had far worse issues there so I switched to Arch. I've considered hacking the program to manually play an audio file, but I'd rather figure out (or make an attempt at) why the X bell isn't working properly.
Sorry if this is a little hard to follow, it's late and I'm getting tired. At the very least if you can't provide any suggestions, if you could try the X bell yourself to see if it works on your machine in either xterm or urxvt that'd be much appreciated. I'd at least like to know if it's everyone or just me. Thanks for your time either way.

Answer 1

Here's my belated resolution, sort of, to this problem. My tests indicated that it was gnome that was blocking the system bell somehow. When I would go to a real terminal (via ctrl-alt-F#, not an xterm), the system bell would work normally. Well, I stopped focusing on getting the system bell to work under the Gnome desktop because I really only needed it for one program--pidgin--and I didn't need it in its stock form, i.e., where it issues only a single beep. Instead, I began to focus on getting the program I'd been using to give the special system bell tones I wanted--a program called "beep"--to work. I discovered--as I'd likewise discovered in the past when this had happened but had forgotten about that--that it was a permissions problem. I implemented the solution I found at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php? … st10320685 (as well as in beep's documentation) and the system bell, such as I need it, is working fine now.
James