User:Tonyr/Journal/Apr07

04Apr07

G3 iBook
Last week a very nice G3 iBook came in, fully functional, with an airport card, 320 MB/6G. Loren refurbished it, upgrading the hard drive, I think, and installing Ubuntu Edgy. I worked on it a little today, finishing up the details:

• added clock and volume control to the top panel
• added window-hider, window-selector and trash-can to the bottom panel

why didn't they get added automatically at installation?

• modprobed snd-powermac to add the sound device.

why wasn't a sound device detected at installation?  modprobe detected a DACA device; volume-control
shows only Master control but it doesn't connect to the panel applet volume control;  

• finished the update

There are a few things that still need to be done.

• I don't think I added the workspace switcher to the bottom panel, and I didn't local-to-panel any of the added applets.
• The CD started skipping when playing a music CD with SoundJuicer, but not right away. I usually install gxine in that case, but didn't get to it yet. I don't remember getting the specs on the CD; maybe it's not 24x.
• I don't know whether or not Loren checked the battery life. That needs to be done.

Loren and I talked about setting a price of $150 for this machine. Loren said he had talked to (Dave?) about it, too.

Artist lady is looking for a machine
An artist stopped by this afternoon to ask some questions about Macs. She is looking for a machine to do what I gather is graphics/animation related. She mentioned wanting to run some specific Mac software, and asked whether the machines we sell would run Mac OS 10.5. My answer was something like 'No/I don't really know'. Later I looked it up and found out that Apple apparently has published statements tot he effect that 10.5 will run on G4 and later models. She left a name and contact number with me, and I taped a notice on the wall. I should probably put the number in Loren's notebook. I told her we would contact her when a likely machine came in, and that we could not provide any Mac OS at all.

Tech support: replacing a Hard Drive
A store customer brought in a G4 box he had purchased. The hard drive was dead (the dreaded click). I replaced the 30GB drive with another 30 GB drive', and left an installation running. There are some interesting issues about this box. It is apparently one of the first towers to go to the store. The customer left his contact information on a yelow post-it on the top of the machine. He had the price sticker, but not the receipt. Martin suggested that the store might be able to find the receipt based on the customer's name.

07Apr07

G3 color depth suggestion'
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-3723.html says that for X on older G3 machines with ATI/R128 graphics, Depth 16 works better, fps-wise. The article is three years old, but the suggestion is worth looking into.

10Apr07

Zip drives
Some G3 (and G4?) towers have ZIP100 drives. At some point I started testing these by writing to and reading from. Loren has acquired some ZIP250 drives and plans to replace the 100 drives with 250 drives as long as they last.

What is apparently missing is auto-mounting of Zip media. I would have thought that auto-mounting Zip media would be about the same as automounting a floppy. That does not seem to be the case. In Ubuntu 6.10(Edgy) installed onmy PC that has a floppy drive, this entry appears in /etc/fstab:

/dev/fd0   /media/floppy0   auto   rw,user,noauto   0   0

That is probably about the best that can be done, and I expect that it works for mount DOS formatted floppies. I think there may be an underlying assumption about the partition table on floppies, something on the order of "mount the first mountable partition found". I'm not sure how well that translates to Macs. The only references I have seen about Zip drives under Linux so far have assumed either a pre-existing VFAT format on the ZIP media, or creating a partition map and ext2 partition on the media.

It would be nice to provide some minimal level of ZIP support in the MacBuild process, I just don't know what that is yet.

11Apr07

sancube
Sergio brought over a sancube250 and asked MacBuild to test and wipe it. It's a rack of six (IDE?) drives in a box that Mac OS sees as a single 250GB drive. It connects to a Mac via ieee1394 (firewire). There is a special Mac software application that manages it as a RAID device and mediates access for multiple users. I can't find much about this particular model on the web, but there is user's manual for the current model at http://www.sancube.com/support/download.html.

The manual indicates that without the application, a Mac will ignore the scancube completely. that does not mean that the hardware is not recognized. The system profiler sees six drives on the firewire 'bus'. Ubuntu Edgy (6.10), however, sees only five drives. I don't know why. The OS X system profiler reports six devices and two unidentified devices. The Ubuntu startup log (dmesg) shows 5 drives assigned (sda...sde) and two unrecognized devices. (I'm writing this from memory, so I need to go back and examine dmesg again.)

Replication
The HD replication process succeeded for a G4 target today. The G4/533 reported earlier came back around, and I discovered that it had 7 partitions instead of four, as would be the case if a normal installation (or replication) had been done. I think this was a remnant of an experimental time in the development of the replication process.

Matteo offered that he is working on bringing up a new server that may have enough storage to serve all of the root file system images that the replication process currently uses. I told him I believed that it was possible to do a netboot and install that way using an installion CD iso loop mounted. He said getting the images available via remote mount and rsync would be a good start.