Puppy 3.01: sound crackles and pops; low battery life

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Running Puppy 3.01, ALi 5451 sound chip, OEM'ed Lucent wifi card, driver is orinoco_cs.

Sometimes sound will pop on my laptop. It's not noticeable in music, but gets extremely annoying in DosBox, and it happens really often there too. Like every 30 seconds or even less there is a pop. Not related to what's on the screen, not because of high CPU usage.

I remember i had the same under windoze when i got this laptop, but much, much worse. I then discovered using DPC Latency Tools that the wifi card drivers were causing latencies of over 50000usec (the maximum amount of time a driver should stay in a DPC call is 125usec, as specified by Microsoft) even when the card was sitting idle. The solution was disabling the wifi (not just from the switch, disabling it in Device Manager), and i then swapped the wifi card from my old Portege 4000 to this one, which fixed the problem. This card would still cause spikes of up to 4500usec, but only when probing for networks, regular traffic was fine.

Now one more thing that annoys me in Puppy is the extremely low battery life. In XP i used to push around 5 hours, now i barely get 3. I have enabled SpeedStep, i'm not able to use the "slow down CPU then start fan if needed" cooling method as ToshUtils doesn't work under 3.01, but this wasn't that taxing. Back on topic:

I've read somewhere that by default Linux wifi drivers will go into an agressive scanning mode till they find a network, thus chewing up on battery life (and my sound too). I think this is the case here, so is there any way to enable the wifi only when needed? I tried rmmod orinoco_cs but it said the module was in use, and the --force option doesn't work.

So any ideas how to turn it off? PS. I don't want to buy a new wireless card.

[Béèm]

Load the bootmanager
You will get a panel where you can disable or black list a driver.
Click on that button and choose the driver you want to disable and prevent from loading.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

I have blacklisted them, rebooted, now they are back. Any more ideas?

[HairyWill]

If you have ever saved your wireless config then you probably have two files in /etc that are used to set the wireless up automatically on boot. These are named after the interface ie eth0wireless and eth0mode. Now when you reboot you may find that you are able to rmmod the driver.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Thanks, that worked but didn't help, so i just yanked the card out. Bad news - the popping still occurs. Guess it's the sound driver itself to blame...

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Well, now for the good news (finally).

I spent my night tweaking at .asoundrc and managed to get rid of all the popping. Also, now things seem to run smoother, and a few games that had audio delays in Wine coupled with a boatload of sound errors showing up in the console now work perfectly with no delays at all.

[HairyWill]

What did you change?

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Here's my .asoundrc. Not that it'd matter now as it started popping again. Jeez, it worked fine last night and i only left it running to download something... Restarting the X server and even rebooting didn't help any. I hate my sound chip.

I got the info off various websites. Routed everything through dmix and set as follows:

Code: Select all

pcm.!default {
	type plug
	slave.pcm "dmixer"
    }

 
    pcm.dmixer  {
	type dmix
	ipc_key 1024
	slave {
	    pcm "hw:0,0"
	    rate 48000
	    channels 2
	    period_size 4096
	    buffer_size 32768
	    period_time 84000
	    buffer_time 340000
	}
	bindings {
	    0 0
	    1 1
	}
    }
 
    ctl.dmixer {
	type hw
	card 0
    }

I found this: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... ng-355587/ Check 4th post. Now the problem is that Puppy doesn't have setpci so i can't test it. Anyone know how to install it?

Another edit: It must've been something else last night, as the only program that likes my .asoundrc settings is Wine. XMMS and DosBox do direct hardware access so they don't give a damn about what i set in .asoundrc, and now when i set XMMS to route through dmix it crackles a lot more.

Yet another edit: Wine doesn't care either, i think it fixed those errors after i ran e2fsck. As the only things that care about .asoundrc are console apps, i deleted the damn file and went looking where i should've been looking in the first place - the dosbox.conf file. I set the sample rate to the hardware's native 48kHz, so it doesn't have to downsample anymore. I then increased the prebuffer to 2000, and voila. No more popping and clearer sound thanks to the higher sample rate.

So i guess it's solved.