Musical Stings Audio For Boot-Up / Menus

[borgqueenx]

Is saving the ram to sd card function also available? (dont know how this is called but i always use this on my vista notebook instead of shutting down)

And playing a sound of not more then 10 secs is ok with me. It can play for 3 seconds more if the booting is done, but must not be much longer.

 

[dflemstr]

Is saving the ram to sd card function also available? (dont know how this is called but i always use this on my vista notebook instead of shutting down)

It's called "suspend to disk".
Also, yes.
The question is why you would want to, since suspend to RAM will give you enough battery time, and suspend-to-disk will take ages (~13-26 seconds on average I think), + your SD cards will be worn out needlessly.

And playing a sound of not more then 10 secs is ok with me. It can play for 3 seconds more if the booting is done, but must not be much longer.

+1

 

[borgqueenx]

I think thats the first +1 i got on this forum lol.
But suspend to ram will eat battery right? How much hours will i get on lets say 1000mah?

 

[CoMiKe]

Call me dim but how would playing a small start-up ditty slow the boot up?
Presumably this can be done in background so the net impact would be too little to notice.

You won't have multitasking until then kernel is loaded.
Then, having a simple command-line player, you could teorically play a sound while the rest of the system is loading (correct me if I'm wrong), but that would need some work.

I believe it would take some seconds until the system is prepared to play the sound.

A good idea could be to show a dimmed Pandora logo on boot and, when the sound is ready to be played, light the logo with a short animation, like some phones do.

 

[Pleng]

Actually MWeston ruled out Suspend-To-Disk in his recent technical update.

Essentially I believe it goes like this:

Suspend-to-ram isn't available and won't be for a long time due to driver issues. In the mean time an ultra-low-power mode will be used in place of suspend. This sounds pretty awesome to be honest and preferable to suspend to ram. It should give about 10 days of 'suspend' (ultra low power) from a full charge. But the lact of a genuine working suspend to ram function pretty much rules out any suspend to disk function.

 

[kagato]

Call me dim but how would playing a small start-up ditty slow the boot up?

I'm not a systems-level programmer, but I suspect the issue would be initialisation of the sound hardware drivers. You'd have to rearrange the boot sequence to push the audio initialisation as early as possible (otherwise it's not really a "boot" sound), and doing so probably screws up an otherwise "optimal" boot configuration causing it to take longer. Plus you could never get the audio init to happen right at the start, so there would always be some delay before the startup sound anyway.

Devices with an instant-on sound (eg. Apple Mac) generally have a dedicated boot-sound chip or bios feature.

---

Given the above, I think the best system sounds would be a "ready for use" sting just before launching the desktop environment (xfce/pmenu), a subtle-but-cool background music track for pmenu itself (this would obviously just be a default that the user can change or disable), and maybe even a "Pandora Anthem" included as a bonus audio track.

Of course, I'm sure we'll all accept any other musical gifts you see fit to bestow upon us!

 

[Alec]

Call me dim but how would playing a small start-up ditty slow the boot up?

I'm not a systems-level programmer, but I suspect the issue would be initialisation of the sound hardware drivers. You'd have to rearrange the boot sequence to push the audio initialisation as early as possible (otherwise it's not really a "boot" sound), and doing so probably screws up an otherwise "optimal" boot configuration causing it to take longer. Plus you could never get the audio init to happen right at the start, so there would always be some delay before the startup sound anyway.

It depends on the kernel configuration. If the kernel has the the sound drivers built in, the sound could be played pretty much right after udev populates /dev with device nodes, which is basically the first thing that happens after the kernel loads (and if I understand correctly, the Linux 2.6.32 will be able to do it by itself with devtmpfs). That would of course mean about 7 second (my guess) delay between startup and the startup sound.

Also, there's no "optimal" bootup order - the best is when services all load as soon as they can at the same time, so that the CPU and the disk are used up as much as possible - so the only slow-down you would get is the split-second it takes to start the player and open the sound file.

 

[borgqueenx]

Actually MWeston ruled out Suspend-To-Disk in his recent technical update.

Essentially I believe it goes like this:

Suspend-to-ram isn't available and won't be for a long time due to driver issues. In the mean time an ultra-low-power mode will be used in place of suspend. This sounds pretty awesome to be honest and preferable to suspend to ram. It should give about 10 days of 'suspend' (ultra low power) from a full charge. But the lact of a genuine working suspend to ram function pretty much rules out any suspend to disk function.

how much will we get with suspend to ram if it becomes available?

 

[WizardStan]

how much will we get with suspend to ram if it becomes available?

Months.

 

[bzar]

how much will we get with suspend to ram if it becomes available?

Months.

Two, to be exact.

*ducks*

 

[borgqueenx]

how much will we get with suspend to ram if it becomes available?

Months.

A month on a full battery? Thats good enough.
I hope this ability will be available soon, but i have no idea how long and how hard it is.

 

[Tuxedomask29]

how much will we get with suspend to ram if it becomes available?

Months.

A month on a full battery? Thats good enough.
I hope this ability will be available soon, but i have no idea how long and how hard it is.

Turning it off will give you even more power savings :-O. LOL But personally, I think 10 days is good enough, any longer and I would have cut it off anyway.