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

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Miriam English wrote:
> 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.

Learn something new every day! (:
 
> 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.

Nice!
 
> 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.

Even better!
 
> 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.

Oh, wow. I suppose you could have more than one Puppy rewritable CD
so that if you mess one up, you can grab the next one. (:
 
> 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.

Good to know! We have two of those flash drives, but I don't know
much about them. My son uses them more than I do. (:

> 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.

Oh, that's really cool!

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.