I got a call today from someone who was in need of help with their Power Mac G5 computer. The problem they were having was the system would power up, the famous startup chime sound effect would play but there would be no video displayed on the monitor. As far as the monitor was concerned the computer was still off as the power light on it would remain amber instead of turn green. Unfortunately you don’t get Mac-oriented training in most technical institutes so I didn’t know exactly how to approach the problem. Is it hardware? Is it software? It was time to call for reinforcements!
With the help of a friend of mine who happens to use a G5 for graphics design work on a daily basis we began troubleshooting this machine. Going off of Apple’s official troubleshooting pages we tried holding Command-Apple-P-R at boot in an attempt to reset the PRAM (which is similar to a PC’s CMOS) but for some reason it would never reset, or at least we never heard the second chime sound indicating a reset.
Ultimately the thing that did the trick was unplugging the systems power cord, opening the case up, removing the dual-fan assembly that’s in front of the RAM slots and pressing the PMU Reset button located on the “logic board” ONCE! The ONCE part of this was stressed as pressing it more than once could potentially turn the system a trendy looking boat anchor.
When the system was powered back up there was no video for a moment and then the OS finally started to boot. I shut the system down, turned it back on and it still worked. So I had considered this a finished job and decided to shutdown and take the computer back to it’s owner. Well, then things got strange all over again.
With the system back under the desk in its original location, reconnecting the USB cables for the printer, keyboard and mouse to the computer and pressing the power button I was greeted to a chime, the grey-on-grey Apple boot-splash screen but that was it. No whirly-circle busy animation, no hard drive activity, nothing. So I forced the power off and waited before retrying again. Suddenly we were back to square one with no video on screen.
I decided to see if hitting the PMU reset would help here so I unplugged the system, opened the case, pressed the button and shut it back up. That didn’t work. Finally I unplugged everything from the system except the keyboard and the power and turned it on again. The system finally booted up to the desktop. I shut it down and reattached the printer and the networking cable while the system was powered off. For some reason this had an effect on the computers ability to boot up because it didn’t want to show video once again. I pulled everything but the keyboard one more time, powered it up and it booted all the way up once more. While the computer was on I reattached all the USB cables as they were, which produced no problems, shut the computer down, and finally upon powering it back up it successfully booted all the way.
So, we have a very interesting glitch here with Apple’s Power Mac G5 machines. It would seem that if you have the system powered off and you attach certain devices via USB while the system is off, it gets confused when you first turn it on. Perhaps the PRAM keeps an inventory of USB devices and where they are plugged in that throws a fit if anything on those ports change while it’s off. Well, that’s what I think. It’s only a theory. Alternatively there might have been something going on with the printer; perhaps some funky USB-to-LPT converter wasn’t declaring itself properly.All that I know is the best thing to try if you have this kind of problem is to unplug the machine and all cables attached, hit the PMU reset ONCE, plug the power and keyboard only back in and then press the power button with your fingers crossed.
This reminds me of a PC that my fiances father owned that had a PCI USB port expansion card in it to add 3 more ports to the back of the PC. You had to plug USB devices in before turning the computer on or they wouldn’t be detected by Windows. Kind of the opposite of what’s going with this Mac. I’m sure fixing something like that would be a matter of a firmware update for the card itself but there wasn’t one available when I checked, nor were any updates available for Mac OS today. Anyway, it was a learning experience for me; its not too often you get a chance to attempt fixing a Mac hardware problem.
I have my M-Audio and Yamaha keyboards hooked up and ready for me to bang out some tunes yet haven’t brought myself to move forward on previoustracksI’vestarted work on. However, I have stumbled across some really neat music someone else made. I discovered it while watching this video of an ant-shaped robot:
After sifting through the comments for another video by the same robot-building guru I found out that the song in this video is called “Parks On Fire” by Trifonic.
I’ve just purchased their deluxe digital copy of two of their CDs for 8 dollars. You can stream/preview the whole thing with this little jukebox I’ve embedded here. If you enjoy it, show your support for an independent musical group and buy their album!
This tutorial will show you how to setup a program called PS3mediaserver which will allow you to share your multimedia files with your PlayStation 3 over a local area network.
This tutorial will show you how to share a folder in Ubuntu with a Windows virtual machine running inside Virtualbox. Make the video full-screen to enjoy it in HD quality.
I came across an article in Network World magazine that goes over five common Internet scams and thought this needed to be shared with everybody. Please click here to read the article.
I was just browsing Ubuntu Forums recently and someone wanted to get a second opinion to see if it were indeed true that Linux doesn’t need anti-virus software. I humbly obliged them with my own answer on the matter:
You don’t need anti-virus for Linux. Others in here will do a better job at explaining why this is, but in short, the OS has a big advantage here due to it being open source. The operating system is a product of crowd-sourcing, much in the same way as Wikipedia has been since it first showed up several years ago. And much like the highly-moderated articles of Wikipedia that require membership and an approval process for changes made to locked articles, so to is a strict moderation that goes on with the source code for Linux before it’s allowed to become part of the official distribution. Everybody is out to identify possible flaws or weaknesses or bugs in the source code and it’s much easier for any single person to make a contribution because the OS and much of the software that runs on it is open-source.
In Windows, the users don’t have the luxury of being able to dig through the source code to look for flaws. All they can do is report symptoms of problems to Microsoft, and the limited number of paid programmers that do have access to the source code then have to decide what flaws are the most important and which ones don’t merit their attention. So with Windows, a bug that affects only 500 people won’t be as important as a bug that affects 500,000 and probably won’t be fixed at all. But if it were Linux and if just one or two of those 500 people were a programmer who had access to the source code and figured out how to fix the problem on their own, the other 498 would actually stand to benefit from a patch that ends up being released thanks to the work of that one developer who had some spare time on his hands and decided to do something about a bug simply because he could.
So throughout the long life of Linux there has been this much more diversified, seasoned, multi-cultured source for development feedback that has helped to make it a much stronger, more “mature” operating system, especially in terms of the way security was designed. If there was ever a person out there who found a way to circumvent that security, there is at least one other who knows exactly how to repair the flaw. The reason viruses are able to best Windows is because their developers can only patch so many holes, and the ones they don’t have time to get around to end up being exploited the most. Third-party software developers that make Anti-Virus software make a killing because Microsoft is unable to handle this responsibility all by themselves, and even still, the best anti-virus software isn’t perfect.
The reason anti-virus software isn’t necessary in Linux is simply because the OS and its updates that patch vulnerabilities do the exact job anti-virus software in Windows is meant for: Prevent unwanted, malicious software or network activity from compromising the system. If there were a flaw in Linux found that allowed something like that, it wouldn’t be the job of some third-party software to safeguard the user against but the job of the OS itself. The reason anti-virus software even exists is simply because Microsoft is unable to handle the immense work load of patching their own source code as well as a crowd of Linux geeks can.
Am I saying Linux is perfect and invincible to viruses? Might it become more susceptible to viruses in the future if it were to ever become as popular as Windows is today? I would think that with an increase in the number of users would also come a complimentary increase in the number of clever developers that would only help to increase the number of eyes available to find flaws and fix them. Saying that Linux would get a lot of viruses down the road because more people are going to use it is like saying Wikipedia will become rife with widespread, uncontrollable vandalism because more people visit it. It hasn’t happened yet, and very likely never will happen because of the way it is designed, moderated and improved upon by the hive mind.
EDIT to add: As mentioned in the first comments below, I failed to acknowledge that while Linux is more robust in the area of security, nothing can compensate for the weakest link in this arrangement: The User. A novice user could easily be enticed by a sinister website that tells them to download a deb file which might contain malicious code and absentmindedly install it or execute a destructive command from the terminal window because they didn’t know any better (like rm -rf ~/*). Fortunately for novice users there is little if any need to actually venture out into uncharted territory like a terminal window or strange websites to get software, thanks to the official repositories that contain a HUGE collection of software which continues to grow. I’ve even heard you will soon be able to purchase proprietary Linux-based software through it. Unfortunately, little can really be done to compensate for user negligence, and trying to compensate for all possibilities would likely result in too many annoying alerts and prompts for the average user (like when Windows Vista sprang the UAC on its users).
There are only a couple of circumstances that I believe anti-virus software on a Linux platform would might be worth having which involve helping to protect other Windows systems. Say you got an email from someone that contained a virus but you never knew it was there and forwarded it onto someone else who uses Windows, resulting in their day being ruined and you being blamed. So that’s one scenario. You might also have a Linux server administrating a network of Windows based workstations which you have read/write access to and use the server to conduct scans of these machines over the network, but at the expense of finite network bandwidth and CPU cycles on the server.
All good things come to an end… Fortunately, Virtual Dave isn’t one of them. I’ve recently made the decision to drop my own remote assistance software in favor of using a new open-source VNC launcher called Gitso. This launcher has a few benefits over the previous iterations of my older “Virtual Dave” software:
Lightweight: It’s written in Python and loads very fast.
Simple: Sometimes losing a couple “bells and whistles” is a good thing.
Multiple platforms: Gitso works on Windows, Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X.
Active Development Pipeline: A feature request I submitted was approved for the next version less than a half hour after I submitted it.
Open-Source: Free as in freedom.
There are a lot of features in the coming versions of this software I have been looking for in a VNC tool for a long time. And who knows, I might learn a thing or two about programming in Python with this little tool.
