sound corruption necessitates routine reboot

Using applications, configuring, problems
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Karl Godt
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#21 Post by Karl Godt »

YT is changing from flash to html5 . For your sound it seems that some driver thinks it has to recreate the device nodes after a while. If USB adapters disconnect shortly, such happens. Sure you have enough RAM, but it needs SWAP and fast SWAP. Older HDDs might run too slow to manage huge swap usage in appropriate time. I remember firefox freezing on me too in times of a 4gb MWDMA HDD with 640 MB SWAP and 320mb RAM and 650 MHz CPU .

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nubc
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#22 Post by nubc »

The current system which is experiencing familiar audio and SM issues has 1.0 GB swap on a 1.0 TB SATA hdd/single ext2 partition, 2.0 GB DDR2 ram, 2.8 GHz P4 with HT enabled.

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Karl Godt
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#23 Post by Karl Godt »

And why do you use ext2 on such new gear ?

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tune2fs -j /dev/MY_SUPER_DOOPER_HDD
fsck /dev/MY_SUPER_DOOPER_HDD
should create an ext3 fs on it.

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nubc
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#24 Post by nubc »

1. I've never felt the need for file system journaling.
2. All my computers run ext2
3. You will have to assure me the safety/integrity of my data for me to consider running a command to change the file system on a 1-TB drive almost half full. The OS and data are on the same partition. (I may change this in the future, ie. separate partitions for OS and data.)
Last edited by nubc on Tue 19 Mar 2013, 19:44, edited 6 times in total.

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Karl Godt
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#25 Post by Karl Godt »

Go to a pc doctor then . Backups to an external HDD are always recommended and to boot frugally into RAM once a while to run fsck also onto the unmounted partition . A separate partition to hold more than one Puppy-Version.sfs also . Simple usual common sense .

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nubc
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#26 Post by nubc »

Karl,
I'm going to rearrange my hard drives soon, and will seriously consider your recommendation to use ext3 when I format. At the very least, an ext3 file system should make for shorter fsck's. With regard to backups, a colleague has expressed serious doubts about long-term large drive integrity. He has experienced hdd crashes in less than a year on a succession of large (1 TB or greater) drives, so much so that he now uses only 500 GB hard disks because of (perceived) greater integrity and longevity. Thus I am puzzled about back-up to external hdd, because that external drive would necessarily be quite large in capacity. and so I worry about drive integrity when dealing with this much data. Have you or others experienced premature failure in hard drives 1 TB and larger?

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Karl Godt
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#27 Post by Karl Godt »

I have no running TB HDDs until now. I partition my drives to 3x15-20-25 GB partitions which hold my three main OS in full installation : Macpup Foxy3, Macpup Opera2 (both puppy-4.3.x based) and one Lupu-5.1.1 . Each full installation started once on 15gb partitions, then moved onto another drive with 20gb partitions and now my next drive will hold them on 25gb partitions since i have 10gb in /usr directory . My current 250gb has a 80gb partition for backups using rsync to a folder , mksquashfs on that folder and removing the rsync folder afterwards to free space. The backup OSNAME-YYYY-MM-DD.sfs is getting moved to 2 USB HDDs . So i have 80gb free space all the time. I am experimenting with a boot partition that hold also the kernel modules on the next drive and so far the both Macpup are booting except for that the localedef binary from glibc-2.6.1 seems not to like multi-thread or 64bit capability. The next is a 500gb and will have a 250gb backup partition compared to the 80gb i have until now.

This is my current HDD layout:
bash-3.00# probepart -m |sort

/dev/sda1|ext4|47653|S
/dev/sda2|ext4|47653|S
/dev/sda3|ext3|23854|S
/dev/sda4|extended|357775|S
/dev/sda5|swap|3820|S
/dev/sda6|ext3|23854|S
/dev/sda7|ext4|47661|S
/dev/sda8|ext4|47661|S
/dev/sda9|ext4|234778|S
/dev/sda|ext4|476940|S
/dev/sdb10|ext4|79728|S
/dev/sdb11|swap|4369|S
/dev/sdb1|ntfs|44342|S
/dev/sdb2|ext4|20959|S
/dev/sdb3|reiserfs|20771|S
/dev/sdb4|extended|152342|S
/dev/sdb5|swap|4102|S
/dev/sdb6|ext3|20755|S
/dev/sdb7|ntfs|20143|S
/dev/sdb8|vfat|3004|S
/dev/sdb9|ext4|20238|S
/dev/sdb|ntfs|238418|S
/dev/sdc1|none detected|4275|N
/dev/sdc2|none detected|3338|N
/dev/sdc3|none detected|1907|N
/dev/sdc4|none detected|5887|N
/dev/sdc|none detected|15424|N
/dev/sr0|iso9660|131|S
/dev/sr1|not inserted|1023|N
bash-3.00#
sda will be the new one and sdb is the current one. probepart is hacked by me for more detailed output.

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nubc
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#28 Post by nubc »

I have the idea that the ethernet connection gets re-negotiated every 4 hours and this is what causes Flashplayer to misbehave, ie, degenerate into a short sound loop. What other event occurs after 4 hours of use? It seems to occur consistently after 4 hours, every 4 hours, so apparently a count is taking place, either on the computer or on the ISP side. This sound degeneration has occurred under almost all circumstances, so it isn't because of the specific activity, except that Flashplayer is used to stream audio videos.

I find it baffling that other users don't have this problem, since all of my computers (running Puppy) seem to have the issue. It's not a matter of full versus frugal install either, because I have experienced the problem running from live CD (Puppy in RAM).

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Flash
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#29 Post by Flash »

I have a similar problem with Flash player. I've noticed that if I pause the YouTube video I'm watching and don't finish watching it for a while (I can't say how long exactly, an hour perhaps), when I resume watching it, the sound won't work right. Then all other YouTube or Flash things I try to watch have the same problem until I shut down SeaMonkey and restart it. My Puppy is Slacko 5.4 on a multisession DVD, in a computer with 4 GB of RAM and no hard disk drive at all, so no swap.

Things have been this way for years. I think I tried a version of Puppy in that time which didn't have the problem, but I couldn't say which one.

I've found that as long as I either watch the video to the end, or stop (not pause) it, the problem doesn't happen. I have Flashblock installed, so if I open a YouTube video in a new browser tab it doesn't start playing until I click the Flash window. I can line up a number of browser tabs, each with a YouTube video waiting to play, and play them when I want, as long as I don't pause one and let it sit for too long.

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nubc
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#30 Post by nubc »

Thanks for your input, Flash. Do I understand you right, that you only have to restart Seamonkey? Or do you have to reboot the computer to get Flashplayer to work again?
Last edited by nubc on Wed 17 Apr 2013, 19:52, edited 1 time in total.

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xophist
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#31 Post by xophist »

I had a problem with looping/stuttering sound on slacko5.4.

I never rebooted, just quit Firefox and the problem cleared.

For other reasons, I tried slacko5.4-PAE and have never had the problem (uptime=75 days).

The PC was always near max memory use, now on PAE "free" shows 7495788 used, way more than is available on the non-PAE version.

So how about trying a PAE version?

This kind of anecdotal voodoo might not help, but it should be easy to give it a shot.

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Flash
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#32 Post by Flash »

nubc wrote:Thanks for your input, Flash. Do I understand you right, that you only have to restart Seamonkey? Or do you have to reboot the computer to get Flashplayer to work again?
It's been a while, but if I remember right all I have to do is restart SeaMonkey (or Firefox), not reboot the computer.

I'd say to go with what xophist suggests. Try a few different versions of Puppy. Burn a CD-RW of one and boot it with the pfix=ram option, then see what happens. If you have to reboot for some reason, you can save to the CD-RW (make a multisession Puppy) so it comes back up without going to the Save file on your hard disk drive. If that Puppy don't work, burn the next Puppy iso onto the CD-RW with either Burniso2cd or Pburn. I don't remember if you have to blank a CD-RW before Burniso2cd will burn a new iso on it, but I know you don't have to blank a rewritable DVD first.

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nubc
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#33 Post by nubc »

You're right, all I have to do is close and restart Seamonkey. However, I couldn't recover Seamonkey instances and locations without closing all Seamonkey browsers at the same time, which means Restarting x server instead of rebooting. This represents a time improvement, but it's still an inconvenient interruption, and very disruptive, plus Seamonkey is limited in its ability to recover all previous windows.

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