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The Road Warrior Mailbag - December 3, 2007

Pismo Family, the Beginning--and a question
Pismo Family Gaining a New Member of the Household (2)
Death of a Tibook, resurrection of a trusty clamshell, PowerMac plodding on as ever
HELP!
AirPort Card with OS 10.2
Leopard and Mail

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Pismo Family, the Beginning--and a question

From Jerry

Hello Charles,

I've been talking about the glories of the Pismo for sometime in the family. My 7 year old (refurbished) Pismo is now upgraded with a Wegener G4 and doing some fairly heavy lifting with Photoshop Elements 3, and Keynote presentations.

My father has one now, a nephew has one, my aunt wants one, and my mother-in-law wants one (despite her having a brand new intel iMac!).

I must thank you in large measure, for I showed some of them your articles and they became convinced at the current eBay prices to buy them.

I picked up one on eBay recently with a folder/question mark on bootup. No HD. 64mb RAM. 500Mhz G3. No PRAM battery. REAL CHEAP.

I figured it would be an easy fix, but it has me a little baffled and I wonder if you could steer me the right direction:

I wound up putting in a spare notebook HD, new PRAM battery. I tried booting from the 10.3 CD, but no go. It booted to the OS 9.1 CD so I figured it's firmware is password protected in OS X. I installed OS 9.1 and it boots up in OS 9. But I'd like to put OS X on. We're an OS X family.

I assume there is a password on the open firmware that prevents me from installing OS X. I tried resetting it, but the lil' Pismo refuses to boot into the OS X
installer.

Is there a way to eliminate the old firmware password? Well, if you can direct me to an expert who could advise, that would be great! Otherwise, it might need a trip to an apple repair shop for them to open it up and erase the firmware if such things are possible.

Regards,
Jerry

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Pismo Family Gaining a New Member of the Household (2)

From Jerry

Hello again Charles,

Well, I found the answer to my question about the firmware. Sure enough, someone must've locked it with a password. Then while spending a few hours searching the web (on dialup), I found it on an AppleFritter forum from a tech savy forum member:

"...the machines have been locked with a firmware password. There is no way to boot the machine with any device unless the password is disabled. Reformatting the drive won't help because the password is in firmware, not the drive. The password can be disabled by changing the amount of physical RAM (i.e) adding or removing a chip, then upon the next startup, flash the PRAM. Failure to flash the PRAM on the first startup will result in no removal of the password."

Rick Smiling

Learned something new today and thought I'd pass it on!

Sincerely,

Jerry

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Hi Jerry;

Wow! A Pismo clan. I understand.

Glad you got it sorted out. I'm afraid I wouldn't have been much help.

Open Firmware is terra incognita for me, so thhanks for the information. Now I've learned something too.

Apple has a Knowledge Base article on the topic:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106482

So does the Macintosh Security site:
http://www.securemac.com/openfirmwarepasswordprotection.php

Charles






Death of a Tibook, resurrection of a trusty clamshell, PowerMac plodding on as ever

From Ian

Hi Charles,

Sent you a few emails a couple of years ago about a Pismo that I bought to do my dissertation on - I tricked it out with a DVD burner, upgraded to an 80GB hard drive and maxxed out the ram. Fell in love with it, but had to sell it on because I already had a clamshell iBook whose looks I loved, and a dual G5 PowerMac that can handle anything too intensive for the clamshell. I just basically used the Pismo for 4 months as a word processor and websurfer in the university library, and with two fairly new batteries in it, I could get 9 hours (!!!!) life out of it between recharges. Still miss it now - I'm considering getting another one when I qualify as a doctor next year - my demands of portable computers are very limited - word-processing, emails, and DVDs are all I need them for. But anyway it's hinges felt like they were getting tired, and it was quite battered, so I sold it on on Ebay while it still had good resale value.

Anyway, shortly afterwards, my girlfriend's iBook G3 900mhz was stolen, and the insurance wouldn't pay out. So she had very limited funds to buy a replacement - was annoying because I'd finally got an agreement from Apple to replace it with a brand new iBook G4 (it had suffered from the dreaded logic board failure). So Apple, bless them, after a direct email to Steve Jobs, were about to replace a 3 year old iBook with a new model. But the iBook got stolen and they obviously couldn't go through with that. My girlfriend had a budget of $700 to buy a new laptop, and I saw what looked like a pristine 1GHz TiBook on ebay. We went for it and it ran perfectly for 6 months, but since then it occasionally had a flickering screen - horizontal lines appearing across it etc. This problem stayed stable, but then the display inverter board gradually died, and now there is no backlight at all. It's ending it's days rather ignominously as a Firewire drive attached to my long-suffering Powermac. So we now have a Powermac that is running perfectly as always, and I've just taken down my graphite firewire SE clamshell off the top shelf and blown the dust off it, and transferred 512MB RAM and the Airport card from the Tibook into it. Plan is that if either of us needs intensive stuff we now use the Powermac, and if we just need Internet, word processing etc, the clamshell is the one we use. Working well so far, so much so that I can't see any need for a new laptop till we qualify as doctors in August 2008 and have the disposable income to get one - managing fine without.

So in conclusion, your previous advice on TiBooks - don't buy them! - was right, and the clamshell is proving to be indestructible still. I know you like laptops, but one computer I don't praise enough is my dual g5. I was given it new back when my father had money in 2003, and in 4 years it hasn't crashed! Not a single problem with it apart from occasionally having to force quit a program - maybe once a month. I went for the best I could get because I thought it would last longer, even though I didn't need it's capabilities at the time. I feel I've made a good decision there. 4 years later it runs faster than when it was bought, thanks to improvements in OS X, and I can't see it getting obsolete anytime soon. When I was making the transition to Apple I didn't believe the people that told me a powermac had a life expectancy of a decade - now I can well believe it true, especially when I have a 6 year old consumer-grade laptop still being an absolutely reliably little runner, and a desktop machine that's still unbelievably fast after 4 years, and still easily expandable to triple the current ram, and quadruple the current HD space, and quadruple the current graphics card. Such a difference from Windows PCs - my previous Gateway PC was just about dead after 3 years under one Windows installation - this one just gets faster with each sequential OS X installation right on top of the previous one. Amazing.

Just out of interest, why do you stick with laptops? Did you never take the route of having a powerful desktop and a basic laptop? Then you could stick with the cooler less fan-noisy older laptops (eg Pismo) you like, and transition to the desktop when necessary for more processor-intensive stuff.

Regards, Ian

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Hi Ian;

Thanks for the chronicle. Gotta love those old clamshells.

Hey, I'm always delighted to hear about anyone getting great service from a Mac - laptop or desktop.

As for the TiBook, sorry to hear about the meltdown, but not surprised. A tech friend of mine specializing in Mac laptops for years says he has a bin full of failed TiBook motherboardrs and just three Pismo ones accumulated over the years. The Ti has its fansm and I expect that some users get excellent service from them, biut it's not a dice-roll I've ever been tempted to take.

Laptop vs. desktop for me? I just like laptops. Since I just posted an article on that very topic in my column on PBCentral this week, rather than a lot of redundant keystrokes, I'll refer you to it:
http://www.pbcentral.com/columns/hildreth_moore/logical.shtml

Charles






HELP!

From Adam

Good Evening Mr. Moore,

I hope all has been well with you. I recently read your musings on Leopard and found them to be astute and thoughtful, as you always are. I've yet to upgrade any of my PPC machines to the big cat, however we received our bulk copy from Apple via our Apple Maintenance Program for all of our machines at work but I will admit I've been slow to upgrade at work as well. I currently have it installed on my dedicated development machine... maybe I'm just not as adept to change as I once was but so far my experience has been the opposite of yours as I'm finding this transition to be a bit more difficult than was the one from Panther to Tiger. As an interesting aside, I also installed it on the big 24' iMac we have down in our print shop. I've yet to do much research into it yet but I am wondering what changes Apple made to Rosetta as Photoshop CS2 has been "wonky" to say the least...

Nonetheless... my current woe has nothing to do with Leopard. It's not really that big of a deal but just a major nuisance that's throwing me off - big time. I just got around to updating my PPC machines to X.4.11 and with it came Safari 3 and there lies my problem. I'm not a "tab" man, I hate it to be quite honest... I like all of my web pages to be in their own wiindow, because of that my routine relies heavily on command-click to open new windows. It seems Apple has changed command-click to now open new windows in the background instead of the foreground. If I were on a desktop or used a mouse this wouldn't be that much of an issue but I'm a 'book guy and this is just really, really annoying.

Do you know of anything that would restore command-click back to opening new windows in the foreground? If not maybe one of my fellow readers would know of something. I believe that you, like I, are a habitual user... we have our routine down to a science. So while this isn't the end of the world it's really going to hinder my productivity for a while. I've always enjoyed Safari as my "daily driver," and other than this I really like Safari 3... but I need my command-click back! Until this gets figured out I'm going to have to goto my backup browser - Seamonkey.

As always, any help is much appreciated.

Best Regards,
Adam

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Hi Adam;

I like Safari 3 too, and indeed in my case it's the first version of Safari that I've ever liked a whole lot. It's speedy (relatively speaking) on my dialup connection, and seems stable in both OS 10.4.11 and OS 10.5.1.

As for the command-click issue, it had never registered with me. I love tabsm and simply can't abide using a browser without them.

There are a bunch of keyboard shortcut options in the Safari preferences, including Command>Option>Shift>click for Opening links in a new window and selecting it.

I think that's the mode you;re looking for, but you do have to hit three modifier keys, which is a bit cumbersome.

This function is probably hackable, but I'm not emough of a hacker to tell you how to do it.

Perhaps someone in readerland.

Charles






AirPort Card with OS 10.2

From Bob

I read your article on using the Buffalo G54 802.11g card with my Powerbook G3. I'm running OS 10.2.8, and I went to look at the hack support site, and am quite confused, for one thing, there is no "Airport Extreme" on my machine that I can find, per the website's ( http://www.kfu.com/~nsayer/osxhax/archives/000025.html ) "step-by-step instructions for getting Apple's AirPort Extreme driver to talk to 3rd party cards:" .

Can you help me figure this out?

Thank you in advance!

Bob

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Hi Bob;

I'm afraid that my ignorance on this topic is fairly encyclopedic - I've never attempted to hack OS 10.2 for Airport Extreme support. The Web page indicates that this hack is anything but an easy slam-dunk.

Airport Extreme is just Apple's terminoligy for the 802.11g wireless connection protocol.

You didn't say which model of PowerBook G3 you are using. If it's a Lombard (bronze Keyboard) or Pismo (FireWire), the easiest and most satisfactory solution would probably be to scare up a copy of OS 10.3 and update to that, which would eliminate any necessity of hacking to support the Buffalo card. A Pismo is officially suppoted by OS 10.4 Tiger, which is even better.

The Buffalo 802.11g card has been pure plug-in-and-play on my two Pismos.

Even a WallStreet can run 10.3, although you need Ryan Rempel's XPostFacto hack to install it.

Charles

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Re: AirPort Card with OS 10.2

From Bob

WIth 6 GB RAM, 192 Mb ROM, & at 400 MHz, I am below the minimum requirement to install 10.3 -- I tried already a couple years ago. I guess I have a Wallstreet, although Apple never gave names to these that I knew of when I bought it new. In the System Profile, it just says "Powerbook G3 Series (Version = 83.0)" -- there's no Firewire.

thank you for your time,
Bob

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Hi again Bob;

I think that's a 6 GB hard drive, 192 MB of RAM and a 400 MHz processor. There was no 400 MHz WallStreet, and the Pismo has FireWire, so it appears that you have a Lombard, which was the middle model of the PowerBook G3 series model troika.

THe Lombard is officially supported by OS 10.3 Panther, but not OS 10.4 Tiger.

However, you're right, a 6 GB hard drive and 192 MB of RAM is marginal, actually for running any version of OS X with decent performance. You would probably be surprised at the speed increase you would realize by upgrading to 512 MB of RAM, or even 384 MB. The 192 MB you have now is split between a 128 MB module, which I expect is in the bottom slot, and a 64 MB module in the upper (easy to get at) slot. Replacing the 64 MB module with a 256 MB module (PC 100 RAM is dirt cheap these days) would get you up to 384 MB, which should be enough to run Panther. One of my offspring ran OS X on a 333 MHz Lombard for several years. The other used her iBook for a year and a half running 256 MB of RAM. It was pretty sluggish, but it worked.

You would be able to install Panther on a 6 GB hard drive, with the caveat that you might have to clear off some stuff that's on it now. With OS X, you should have at least 1 GB and preferably more free on the drive at all times.

Hard drives are pretty cheap these days too. The smallest capacity you can buy now is 30 GB or 40 GB. It's very easy to change the drive in a Lombard.

Charles






Leopard and Mail

From David C

I don't think you'll know the answer until you have the time to do a clean install. I would work with it for a little while with nothing else installed but what's on the Leopard disk, to insure that no gizmos, gadgets, or software not quite optimized for Leopard can possibly be the cause of your problems. This also goes for third party input devices of all types.

Incidentally, when you next try Mail, use the "Window > Connection Doctor" menu item to display a log of what transpires when you try to connect with your SMTP server. That log can be copied and sent to tech support at Apple or your ISP to troubleshoot your problems.

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Hi David;

The way things go around here, it may be quite a while before I get around to a clean install of Leopard. Perhaps one strategy would be to configure a new User identity and try logging in on that.

I don't have a lot of system add-ons, but I do depend heavily on TypeIt4Me and WindowShade X, which unfortunately is not compatible with Leopard, so I have uninstalled it and then Application Enhancer support add-on.

I tried configuring a Gmail account in Mail and tired it out on a WiFi broadband hookup, but unfortunately still no joy. It appears to work, and the "Window > Connection Doctor" gave it a clean bill of health, but test messages I sent to myself would not download in Mail, although I confirmed that they were in my account inbox by checking with a browser, and they downloaded fine in Eudora when I booted back into Tiger. Speaking of Eudora, it seemed to work fine with my ISP account when connected via WiFi, but reverted to a no-go for sending (it does receive) when back on my office dialup connection. Curiouser and curioser.

Maybe a big part of the troubles I'm having is that Leopard doesn't like dialup connections, and mine is slow even by dialup standards - 26,400 bps the max connection speed I've ever seen in OS X.

Charles






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