There has been much written on getting the beep sound from Ubuntu releases over the years. Example: fixing the beep

My needs are slightly different in that I do not want to ensure sound card beeps are functioning. Instead, I want PC speaker beeps, the kind produced by the original built-in speaker because I believe they will produce less CPU load. I have confirmed that my computer has the PC speaker by unplugging the external speakers and shutting down Ubuntu. At some point in the shutdown and restart process a beep is heard even though the external speakers have no power.

I have tried the following:

In /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, turn these lines into comments:

#blacklist snd_pcsp

#blacklist pcspkr

In .bashrc

/usr/bin/xset b on

/usr/bin/xset b 100

Enable in the gnome terminal: Edit > Profile Prefs > General > Terminal Bell

Ensure no "mute" selections in: System > Prefs > Sound > various tabs (uncheck them all).

Select "Enable window and button sounds" in: System > Prefs > Sound > Sound Effects

In gconf-editor desktop > gnome > sound, select the three sound check boxes.

In gconf-editor apps > metacity > general select the audible bell check box.

Still I get no PC speaker beeps when I send code 7 to the console via my Java program or use

echo -e 'a'

or equivalently

echo -e "a"

on the bash command line. (The -e option means enable escape sequence interpretation.) What else should I try?

Update Since my goal is to minimize load on the CPU, here is a comparison of elapsed times. Each test is for 100,000 iterations. Each variant was performed three times so three results are presented for each.

printwriter.format("%c", 7); 

// 1.3 seconds, 1.5 seconds, 1.5 seconds



Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().beep(); 

// 0.8 seconds, 0.3 seconds, 0.5 seconds



try { Runtime.getRuntime().exec("beep"); } catch (IOException e) { } 

// 10.3 seconds, 16.3 seconds, 11.4 seconds

These runs were done inside Eclipse so multiply by some value less than 1 for standalone execution. Unfortunately, Toolkit's beep is silent on my computer and so is code 7. The beep utility works but has the most cost.