Gnome Sound Preferences help refers to a system bell, but it's called system beep.

Thanks for your bug report; confirming.

Gnome Sound Preferences help is contained in the gnome-user-guide rather than ubuntu-docs

According to the upstream bug this applet has been redesigned and the documentation not updated, the linked upstream bug contains a list of all of the differences.

Err... as a newbie to Ubuntu who wants to use the sound card, the lack of accurate documentation is a real turn-off.

As well as the change from "bell" to "beep" (which is pretty trivial), there's also the issue of the completely new user interface on the "general" tab. A lot of the fields are not exactly self-explanatory (at least to a newbie).

To be honest, assigning a low priority to documentation is self-defeating. Linux will never take off until this casual attitude is changed. Yes, I know that MS documentation & help files are equally badly maintained, but there's so much larger a user base that bulletin boards & help sites quickly fill up with fixes. And then there are books like "Windows xxx Annoyances" which help (albeit a year too late given the publication cycle). Linux appears to have none of this, only a "community" which, as soon as a difficult question is asked, goes rapidly silent.

I would like the developers to elevate the importance of this bug.

This issue is present in jaunty, in the beta, with all the packages up to date.

I have found it impossible to disable the system beep in any way. None of the configuration options noted above work for me. I also cannot simply blacklist the pcspkr or snd-sprk module, because my laptop has the speaker built into the sound card - which means the only way to disable it, is to blacklist the module for the entire sound card - which means no sound of any kind whatsoever.

And the beep is really bloody annoying. I know ubuntu developers put it there willingly several versions back, so it's not like you have to search around trying to find it - how hard can it be to put an option on it, whether to enable it or not at shutdown?

Thanks.

Also, the pcspkr creates static for me on reboot, which is an extra annoyance.