Geek in progress

Today is the first time OSX bailed on me. The circumstances were the following. I usually let my new battery drain completely before plugging in the power cable. This morning, I hooked up my iPod nano, and had the machine run on battery. After a few hours, the system gave me a warning to plug the machine in or it would go to sleep. I decided to let it proceed. After the battery was sufficiently drained, OSX automagically went to bed. Upon plugging in, and waking up, OSX told me that a device had been removed prematurely. Obviously I had forgotten to unmount the iPod. iTunes started up, and mounted my iPod just fine. I turned to Colloquy to state that I was back, when the screen got covered in a gentle grey tone, and a square apeared, neatly centered on it, saying that I must restart my machine.

Upon restart, OSX told me it had crashed, and lo! a kernel panic had occured.

Unresolved kernel trap(cpu 0): 0x300 - Data access
      DAR=0x000000000000008C
      PC=0x00000000002C8604
Latest crash info for cpu 0:
   Exception state (sv=0x279EB280)
      PC=0x002C8604;
      MSR=0x00009030;
      DAR=0x0000008C;
      DSISR=0x40000000;
      LR=0x0003C744;
      R1=0x125B3DC0;
      XCP=0x0000000C (0x300 - Data access)
      Backtrace:
0x002C85AC 0x0003C744 0x000A9914
Proceeding back via exception chain:
   Exception state (sv=0x279EB280)
      previously dumped as "Latest" state. skipping...
   Exception state (sv=0x2817F280)
      PC=0x00000000;
      MSR=0x0000D030;
      DAR=0x00000000;
      DSISR=0x00000000;
      LR=0x00000000;
      R1=0x00000000;
      XCP=0x00000000 (Unknown)

The PC being 0×0 in that last state is midly discomforting, though I do not know for certain if it is relevant to this crash or if the information shown is somehow wrong.

Come to think of it, how likely is it that I’ll be allowed to take a spare battery on board of an airplane? After all, I cannot immediately prove that the battery is genuine. It might be a bomb in diguise, no? I would have to turn my laptop on and off, with both batteries before officials might believe the truth: I am simply carrying a real spare battery. Still, there is no way I’m leaving my €129 battery behind.

Apple issued a major battery recall, due to the fact that, apparently, the same batteries that have wreaked havoc among Dell users, are also used in the iBook G4 and the PowerBook G4 (12″ and 15″).

I recently bought a new battery, because the one that originally came with my PowerBook was becoming unreliable, causing the machine to quit without sleeping or shutting down properly. However, it seems this battery is eligible for replacement, so within 6 weeks I’ll be the proud owner of two batteries. Which is excellent when I have to travel long distances. I also checked the new battery, but its serial number falls outside of the range given by Apple as the danger zone.

We’ve been playing with the new MacBook for a few days now, and thus far everything seemed very cool. After reinstalling MacOSX, we gained a lot of disk space because we ditched most of the printer drivers, garageband and a few other space hogs. We installed Adium, MplayerOSX, configured Mail.app, set up the home-banking stuff, etc. So, all was well. Or so we thought.

Forward four days. My girl would like to fiddle around with MySQL and PHP, so I decided to get Fink off teh internets. That way, we could get all the goodies we wanted. It was the picking of the fruit in the Garden, it seemed. The installer refused to finish, although when I checked the /sw directory tree, it looked pretty much ok. Thus. Kill the installer, check the logs. Nothing strange. Ah well, perhaps we can now install XCode, and I’ll check what went wrong later, I thought. No can do, the XCode installer told me. I tailed the logs, I retried, and I only got the same message indicating that somewhere, something was not ok. Permission denied. Being a relative newbie myself, I ls’d through the directory tree, but it seemed all right. Not true, I later found out. After a reboot (yeah, yeah) and a few failed attempts, I tried to start the Activity Monitor application. Nope. Nothing. Nil. Nada. Didn’t start, though it was running fine before the reboot.

In the end googling around, chatting on #macosx, I found out what the problem was. It turned out that the permissions of several files can be fubar’d when an installer runs, or, as teh internets put it: ‘run Disk utility to fix permissions after installing’. Fired it up. Checked permissions. They were fubar, that was certain. Fixing them involved running the Disk Utility by sudo. In the end it all worked out. After the permissions were fixed, the XCode installer did what it was supposed to do, and I ran the pathsetup goodie from Fink.

But the question remains this: what can possibly require an installation script to change file permissions on files it need not touch? I was in love with Mac OSX before. After this event, I’ve cooled down a bit.

I received a call at about 13:22, from IT-Pro. Short and sweet was the message they delivered. `You ordered a MacBook? I’m calling to say it’s in and you can pick it up.’ At 13:38 I was there, and at 13:44 the payment went through.

I hope my girl is very happy with it. Pictures to follow soon.

Update: Pictures

I did it. Order a MacBook, that is. White, 2.0GHz Core Duo, Superdrive, Glossy screen, 1 GiB RAM, 80GB Hard Drive, Localised Keyboard. The Glossy Screen because I refuse to flood the Apple banc account even extra for a Black MacBook with a Normal Screen. The Localised Keyboard, because the machine is a present (albeit paid from the common savings account) for my woman.

Let’s hope she’ll enjoy it. Now, the waiting period begins…