User:Tonyr/Journal/May07

02May07

Powerbook
Later Powerbooks suffer from a lower memory slot failure. Memory for these guys is SODIMM in a two-slot bayonet rack accessible either by removing the back cover or removing a panel on the back. The 12" 867 Aluminum model uses PC2100 memory. The last 15" 1.67/1.5 GHz Aluminum models use PC4200 memory.

The failure is widely reported. <add some reference links here] From what I read Apple does not have a specific fix. This problem may apply to the Powerbook (see #29Apr07) that doesn't boot (I'm hoping).

10May07

A sketchy recap of the past week...

Scream Entertainment Grant
Prepared and disbursed four G4 Powermacs and two monitors to Rick Fernandez, Scream Entertainment contact. He said they will be used for facial distortion feature at this year's Scream at the Beach at Jantzen Beach Center during the month of October. There is an opportunity for follow-up there, photo's and writeup and such.

MacBook
A 2.0G/512PC5300/80 MacBook (2006? Core Duo) arrived 10 May. It powered up once after I took it apart and put it back together. Apparently the previous owner had done the same, but there were a couple of screws missing and one stripped screw site. The DVD slot had been distorted from above, as if it had been stepped or sat on.

There is a problem reported for this generation of MacBooks wherein the CPU Heat Sync would melt the insulation on a nearby (touching) wire and short out the power. That may or may not apply to this laptop, but that is moot, since it was in otherwise less that reasonable condition and I gave it to Sergio for parts sales on (ebay?). The HD had not been wiped yet.

G4/500MHz Dual Proc, Wishlist
There was a Wishlist request for this box, so I contacted the requestor about it. He came to get it. Ali later told me that Wishlist requests received no special treatment, that the Wishlist protocol is to take a wish list item to the store and let them contact the requestor, who would then have a short window to come get it. I believe she also said that the Wishlist was not receiving much attention right now.

This particular box was working when sold, with Ubuntu Feisty installed. The video card, a Radeon RV250, had a DVI and ADC connector, but no VGA. I included a DVI/ADG adapter with the box.

Rsync Images
ToDo: The Rsync images on the replication station need to be updated and expanded to include G4 Feisty and G4 Feisty SMP images.

12May07

Mac Power Supply Testing
I asked yesterday about testing Mac power supplies (G3/G4 towers). The are NOT the same as ATX power supplies (PC), as was pointed out. G3 towers and early G4 towers have a 20 pin connector that looks remarkably like the ATX (v1.x) connector, but the pinout is slightly different. Later G4 towers use a 22 pin connector, like the one that we looked at. ATX (v2.x) connectors use 24 pins.

Dave/Jake (?) suggested acquiring a Mac power supply tester. No such animal that I can find any evidence of. Apple's own power supply testing instructions to Apple technicians is of the form "put the voltmeter test probe on pin 11 of the connector." Doesn't sound too promising, does it?

Short of testing manually, or someone knowing about esoteric power supply tester sources, or building one, or at least building a breakout panel, MacBuild is SOL for testing power supplies.

CD Audio Skip and Gxine
There is an earlier entry in #4Jan07 about the CD Audio Skip phenomenon on slower Macs. The issue with using gxine as a solution then was to make the default operation of gxine not use any visualization. I never addressed that. Interestingly, there has not been any feedback at all from store customers about this.

gxine configuration parameters are found in ~/.gxine/config. There may be a global/default version of this somewhere but I haven't looked for it. The parameters for tweaking are media.audio_cd.drive_slowdown, default 4, revised 0 or 12, and media.audio_cd.drive_slowdown, default 230, revised to 500 (maybe unnecessary). It turns out there is also a visualization parameter there, which can be set to do nothing: gui.post_plugins.audio_visualisation, default goom, revised to None.

These revisions make the default operation permanent. The remaining issue is how to make gxine do the right thing as the default audio auto-startup application.

Feisty
Michael stopped by and inquired about MacBuild's use of Feisty vs Edgy. I said we were installing Feisty on hegher end machines, especially Dual Processor machines, since Feisty had a better PPC SMP kernel version, and that MacBuild would move to Feisty in General as the Rsync images could be added to the HD replicator.

16May07

NextCube
Dave brought a NextCube (68040 based?) to MacBuild last week and asked if we would like to attempt to refurbish it for the museum. There are three Next slabs in the museum's collection also, along with keyboards and an original monitor. I did a little research and joined a forum at http://www.nextcomputers.org to try and collect more information. The user community is small, and NextStep/OpenStep OS software is hard to come by. I was advised to watch ebay.

NextStep Recycling, Eugene
Dave came by on Tuesday to report that he had received an email from Lorraine saying that NextStep would not be picking up/recycling Mac hardware from FG anymore. Dave had the impression that it was not cost effective for NextStep anymore. This raises a lot of issues, not the least of which is reworking Mac triage.

As a side note, Early (Beige) G3s have been candidates for CPU upgrades out in the great world, up to as much as 1GHz. They can also take up to 768 MB PC66 memory. Does this make such machines candidates for Ubuntu?