rxvt-unicode produces no sound when ^G is printed. It's been broken since forever (xorg-1.7 at least, maybe even before that). rxvt-unicode uses XBell() internally (as of 9.07 at least, didn't check other versions), which doesn't work for some reason in recent xorgs. XkbBell(), OTOH, works for me. I'm attaching a patch which fixes the issue for me. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. open rxvt-unicode termnial 2. ping -a localhost 3. Actual Results: ping runs silently. Expected Results: ping should issue a bell sound every second. xorg-server-1.9
Created attachment 259396 [details, diff] Replaced XBell() call with XkbBell()
Honestly, INVALID. Yes, there was a bug in xorg-server around 1.7, preventing XBell from working, but that's been long fix there, so no point in messing with rxvt-unicode.
Well, I assumed so till I upgraded to xorg 1.9 yesterday and re-emerged rxvt-unicode. The issue was NOT fixed for me after that, so I made this patch out of desperation, since I have no idea if upstreams gonna ever fix it at all now.
Perhaps something else is disabling the bell ? I've seen i.e. lxsession do it. See, if 'xset b' helps. Just a minor note: did it ever work for you on your current hardware ?
> Perhaps something else is disabling the bell ? You're right, it's xkbevd. I'm sorry, I should have tested it more thoroughly. The thing is, "killall xkbevd ; xset b on" doesn't switch the bell back on, that's why I missed this one (to be more specific, after that the bell works via PC speaker everywhere, except unpatched rxvt-unicode which remains silent). Restarting X w/o xkbevd does fix the issue, though. So, my bug description is misleading to say the least, and INVALID may be due as well. BUT: rxvt-unicode used to work just fine with xkbevd. Then, after some xorg upgrade, it stopped, and it still doesn't work w/o the patch. Meanwhile, all other applications seems to work with xkbevd wrt beeps (e.g. firefox and gvim). IIRC, some e.g. compiz plugins related to bells also rely on xkbbell event, so it's probably broken for unpatched rxvt-unicode too. I need my xkbevd, so it looks like I'm stuck with the patched version, whenever it is officially blessed or not. I guess it's your call if enough users are affected by urxvt xkbbell event issue then. Thanks for your time and sorry again for the misleading problem description.
This also affects people using PulseAudio's module-x11-bell or GNOME 3 to customize the bell sound. But since xterm is also affected [1], rxvt-unicode might not be the right place to address this. It seems like what's happening is that these systems listen for XkbBellNotify events (see, e.g. Pulse [2]), which I suspect don't get sent for XBell calls. Of course, as long as nothing's disabled audible bells like xkbevd does, both XkbBell and XBell will play a plain bell as expected. Versions of stuff mentioned above: GNOME 3.0.2, Pulse 0.9.23, xterm 270, xorg-server 1.10.2, rxvt-unicode 9.11. [1] Strictly speaking, xterm could use XkbBell, but it always falls back to XBell because xterm doesn't like unnamed bells. See: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=569539#15 [2] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/tree/src/modules/x11/module-x11-bell.c
Created attachment 280029 [details, diff] working patch for 9.12
Affected versions long gone from the tree.
