better quality mp3 player 2924

Black Sun and said:

Sorry about the delay--dangit, too many other things going on.

with a bunch of new things to get confused by :-) .

Try the URL above first, go through as much of it as you want, and maybe buy a paper copy at your local MegaBookStore? For more advanced stuff, you can try lurking on various comp.os.linux.* newsfroups, reading the threads that seem interesting to you and so forth.

OK, I think this means "if the volume's too high, the sound gets distorted." That's reasonably common, when the gain is high, you end up with clipping and such. The time-honored cure for that is to buy more expensive audio equipment, but that's probably not an option here.

IMHO, the A+ stuff isn't worth it. A few years back, I bought a copy of Upgrading and Repairing PCs that included a CD-ROM with sample A+ exams on it. I read the book, took the sample exams without doing any real studying, and scored very highly on every part of them except the questions that dealt with Windows 3.1. YMMV on that, of course!

Yep, *udma5 indicates you're using UDMA-5, which is pretty fast.

hdparm can do a lot of things, but not all of them are totally supported on all hardware, and the "drive sleep" options are overridden by the kernel's IDE code in most cases.

Not quite, but there are a lot of things you can tweak. Something a few people do is run X at a higher priority (like -5) to improve GUI response. This should really not be necessary (and might even make things slower) with a 2.6 kernel and the preempt thing enabled, but it's yet another thing to try.

Shh... they'll *hear* you! (Have you buried your $3000 in the backyard yet?)

i686 is gcc's definition for "PPro-compatible CPU". The Fedora stock kernel is probably compiled for a PPro, because that kernel will run on {PPro,PII,PIII,PIV,Athlon,AthlonXP,Duron} CPUs without recompiling. You can recompile the kernel and tell it to optimize for a PIV--then it probably won't run on anything but another PIV. Performance gains will probably be minimal, but you may want to run a benchmark or 3 with your new PIV-only kernel and compare to the 686-version.

Yep. If ALSA weren't loaded,proc-asoundwouldn't exist.

This seems a little weird to me. I don't use aRts, mostly because I think computers shouldn't make noise unless they're playing movies, music, or games. aRts is supposed to allow multiple sound inputs (xmms and KDE's desktop sounds) to coexist on the same sound output device, and if that's not happening, there may be a bug (or funny configuration problem) somewhere.

Hope this helps,

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong