aaah &*#%... fresh install works fine. it is upgrade glitch

hi ralph and thanks for looking into this!

I tried your suggestion but it didn't work

also I think pc speaker should not be handled by kbd driver (which also strangely was not installed here "xserver-xorg-input-kbd", not sure if was upgrade glitch) because it ruined my keyboard mapping, all arrows/pgup/dn keys appear entirely different (not the keymap).

removed the driver line from xorg.conf and restarted, now I have this:

[  1385.287] (II) config/udev: Adding input device PC Speaker (/dev/input/event7)
[  1385.287] (**) PC Speaker: Applying InputClass "PC Speaker"
[  1385.287] (II) No input driver specified, ignoring this device.

I also have 3 sound cards, one on the mb, which has loopback mixing, one usb audigy, which has only master vol and a strange hdmi interface.
I managed to set amixer -c2 sset 'Loopback Mixing' Enabled and xset b 50 but still no success

installed back pulseaudio and pipewire if they handle somewhere something but nothing happens.

a whole lot of ducks and few monsters around

I believe it should be evdev problem, beep command says

$ beep --verbose
beep: Verbose: evdev driver_detect 0x55e45ecdb700 (nil)
beep: Verbose: b-lib: opened /dev/input/by-path/platform-pcspkr-event-spkr as 3
beep: Verbose: beep: using driver 0x55e45ecdb700 (name=evdev, fd=3, dev=/dev/input/by-path/platform-pcspkr-event-spkr)
beep: Verbose: 1 times 200 ms beeps (100 ms delay between, 0 ms delay after) @ 440 Hz
beep: Verbose: evdev driver_begin_tone 0x55e45ecdb700 440
beep: Verbose: evdev driver_end_tone 0x55e45ecdb700
beep: Verbose: evdev driver_end_tone 0x55e45ecdb700
beep: Verbose: evdev driver_fini 0x55e45ecdb700

and it works. but maybe X does not use the same interface? I don't know how to debug evdev/eudev channels...

I wasted nearly day and a half already so I'm thinking to get fresh install on separate machine (I have lenovo tiny around) so I can see if it is install or upgrade glitch (or both).

thanks again!

@RedGreen925: sorry, forgot to mention that I already checked that and console (text mode) beep works fine. just X ignores the bell events, well, at least audible...

@greenjeans: I don't use any DE, just X with window manager (icewm), so the problem is somewhere in the Xorg, not in apps (DEs). I even did try to run clean X without my xinitrc configuration (which is a lot) and still no beeps...

pretty strange, it worked fine for the last 25 years