Some questions I have

[Furanshisuko]

Hi, first of all, merry christmas to all!!

Puppy made posible for me to switch totally to linux, and besides the dificulties I have encountered, I´m very happy with it.
I was able to find the answers for many situations, but I still have some troubles.
I own an Acer Aspire 5050 laptop and boot Puppy linux 4.3, frugal Install with a 512 mb personal storage file.

This are some of my questions:

1) Some times I like to listen the music a little bit loud, so, in order to avoid disturbing my familiy, I have to use a headset.
The problem is that when I plug-in my headset, the sound of the integrated speakers doesn´t turn off, so I have to mute/unmute the channel called "surround" in alsa mixer to have some privacy.

Is there a file I can set to autodetect if there´s a headset pluged-in ?

2) When I use my computer only to play music when I do other stuff, and I use it with the battery, I want it to last longer, so I keep enabled the frequency scaling tool, disable wifi, turn off the screen, etc.
I have read somewhere that the hard disk is also a big energy leak, so a good trick is to create a RAM disk and put some songs in there to play; that way, the disk is quiet for longer.

Is there a RAM disk already created every time I boot or do I have to make it ? Where is it or how can i make one that will erase the data when I shutdown ?

So far I have tryed copying some songs in the directory called /mnt/ram1, but that eated part of my personal storage file in the disk and caused that the music was saved into it when I shutdown the pc.

3) I have some sort of qwerty brazilian keyboard, and the thing is that the question mark is under the "w" key, like it can be used by pressing "alt gr". When I seted the keyboard to brazilian, all the keys seemed to be ok, except by that one.
While I can´t use this, I copy/paste the question mark from a file I wrote with another keyboard setting ( but that one make all keys incorrect).

So how do I set that simbol ?

Thanks in advance for the reply and the help.

Fura.

[hillside]

1. I always thought the headphone plug was a hardware switch. Does your headphone shut off the speakers when using Windows?

2. If you are booting from a cd/dvd or from a frugal install, and you have enough memory, you should have everything operating in ram.

If you save your music to /mnt/home it will be outside your save file.

3. I don't know anything about Brazilian keyboards, but I'm sure someone will jump in with some info.

Merry Christmas!

[Furanshisuko]

1) With windows, the integrated speaker go mute when I plug the headphone. Any way I have erased windows to oblivious for good

2) The home directory is a partition where I have puppy installed, copying song there, causes that I lose disk space, and what I need is to copy the songs into ram.

[Pizzasgood]

You can create a ramdisk on /mnt/ram1 with the following command:

Code: Select all

mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt/ram1

There's nothing special about that location - you could change the path to point at any directory (preferably empty) to mount a ramdisk there.

The ramdisk will be able to hold up to half the size of your RAM, unless you provide an option to specify a different size. I don't remember the option off the top of my head, but a quick websearch of the word "tmpfs" would turn it up I'm sure.


In many versions of Puppy, however, the /tmp directory is already a ramdisk. You can check with this command:

Code: Select all

df -h

If it is, there will be an entry (probably near the bottom) that says "tmpfs" on the left and "/tmp" on the right. It will also tell you how much space is left in it.


Regarding what hillside said above in point 2, that only applies if you don't have a pup_save.2fs file (or booted with pfix=ram). Otherwise, anything you add or modify will be done on the harddrive unless you specifically put them inside a ramdisk. But the default OS files would still be in RAM.


Sorry, I have no idea about the other questions.

[Furanshisuko]

You were right, the command you told me revealed that /tmp was an already made ram disk, so I can use it in the way that I needed.
Thanks a lot for the tip, little by little, my computer gains more funtionality and I more knowledge.

If anyone else wants to add something regarding the other stuff or like to try some commands, I´m paying attention.

[mikeb]

To get muting with headphones I had to update to alsa 1.1.20...but you have that version so keep an eye out for an alsa update....does alsamixer show all controls as if not that is a good clue.

mike