We already depend on gst in head, and IIRC we fallback to gdk_beeping if this fails. Lots of machines do not have a pc speaker, myself included. :-) Does trunk work better for you?
I saw that, but was wondering what was the launching as external process lacked that lead to the hard dependency...if gst-launch is not present (it is in most GNOME distros by default) the user knows what she's doing :) GDM also does sound on login and does it by calling platform specific and configurable executables (play, aplay). Jani