On this box, the hardware beep /must/ work. And it works fine, outside
of KDE. But once KDE starts up, artsd takes over the system beep, and
artsd doesn't work. The "System Bell" module has its checkbox next to
"use the system bell instead of the little notification sounds", but the
Test botton on that dialog does nothing, and the system beep never happens.
Reading the logfiles, I can see artsd messages every time the hardware
beep is supposed to go off. So clearly it's still being intercepted and
notification sounds are still trying to be played; that's the bug.
Toggling the checkboxes, enabling/disabling the sound system, deleting
cache files, rebooting, etc, etc, doesn't help. It seems to be write-only.