[Techtalk] Sound card gone missing - OSS/ALSA woes

[Miriam English]

Little Girl wrote:

> I'll add a live CD to that list, although there are probably limits
> to what one can do on a live CD, and the live CD forgets any
> changes, so the next time you boot with it, you have to start all
> over again.

I agree about the live CD being an extremely valuable thing to have on 
hand. However the point about losing everything on the next reboot isn't 
necessarily so.

Puppy Linux can run entirely from live CD, with all settings saved 
inside a save-file on the hard drive (the save-file is internally an 
ext2 filing system even though it can sit on any format hard drive). 
Next time you reboot, your system is just how you had previously set it 
up, yet you can't damage the main system because it is on CD.

You can still wreck your settings (I certainly have), but that's easy to 
get around. Puppy lets you have multiple system-save files and choose at 
boot time which you want to use... or none at all.

Slightly more risky is to save the settings back to the CD itself. As 
Puppy is only around 100MB (with video player, web browser, text 
editors, word processor, spreadsheet, and many, many more everyday-use 
programs), there is plenty of room to rewrite settings many times on the 
one CD. And oodles of room if you choose to use a DVD.

Another possibility is to record the live system to flash thumbdrive and 
boot from that, though I notice that very few thumbdrives can be 
write-protected these days. A pity. Puppy takes special care with flash 
drives. It keeps everything in RAM so that saves are done rarely, 
usually at the end of a session, to extend the life of the flash drive, 
which can only do so many delete-write cycles.

There is an internet cafe in England where customers are given a CD with 
Puppy Linux on it, which they can use in the machines at the cafe or 
elsewhere. Each time they return, whichever computer they use, it is 
still set up exactly how they prefer.

Best wishes,

	- Miriam

-- 
If you don't have any failures then you're not trying hard enough.
  - Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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