gross error

[Scott Haneda]

On Jul 8, 2010, at 5:40 PM, John B Brown wrote:

> On 7/8/10 4:02 PM, Scott Haneda wrote:
>> On Jul 8, 2010, at 9:39 AM, John B Brown wrote:
>>> 	I'll stop getting entangled with functional anomalies in MacPorts. Any UNIX/Linux utilities I want I'll modify for myself to work on my iMac. There's a /usr/local here for a purpose; that's where the gnu utilities go automatically.
>> 
>> I'm not sure why you are having so many issues with this.  I believe in reading over your thread you have done a completely new install of your OS.  If that is the case, and you are having these issues, the only thing I can think of is you have corrupt installer discs, something is wrong with your hardware, or your process is flawed. Perhaps you are migrating in an old data file of ~/.profile or ~/.bash* or something that is causing troubles.
> 
> 	Perhaps you misunderstand; there is NO migration of anything. I use the install discs that come with this computer. They replace the install data only, not my personal data; that is still there where I put it.

As mentioned above, MacPorts interacts with your personal data in the ~/. files, which could maybe be causing you issues.  I did not follow this thread closely enough to recall all the specifics.  I just get the general feeling that a complete clean install and working your way up from there may not be a bad idea.

>> I once spent many days brining online a G5 Dual CPU server to have issues in which nothing was working right, no apps would build, lots of problems.  It turned out to be a bad CPU.  I popped in a new CPU, and all my troubles went away.
> 
> 	I'd like very much to know how you managed that with Apple's warranty. In fact, if there are diagnostics available for the current Intel Core 2 Duo CPU on this iMac I would run it in a heartbeat.

As far as I know, every non retail installer disc that Apple ships has Apple Hardware Test on it.  A small hidden partition, or perhaps it is a hook into the firmware, I'm not sure.
    http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1509

It is not what I ended up using to determine on the dual G5 that one of my CPU's was bad, it was simply trial and error.  I pulled ram, put one back in, removed it, put another back in, etc.  Finally I got to the CPU's, pulled one, borrowed a known good one from another machine, problems went away, at that point, I knew what the issue was.

>> Far too many people are working with MacPorts in a perfectly reliably fashion aside from known issues.  Everyone at the least, has it installed, which is where your system seems to be having trouble.  I see no reason why that can't be accomplished on your system, unless there are hardware issues, software corruption, or silent data corruption problems.
> 
> 	My current problems had better not have anything to do with MacPorts; I wiped all that stuff I could find. My problem is with Adobe Flash new dmg not running the graphics on Firefox.

When I ran the latest update from Apple, I had the same problems. I had to reinstall Flash clean, which means deleting all the little bits it left laying around in various places.  Just reinstalling did not work, and I could not find an uninstaller, nor do I believe it would get all the pieces.

> 	I know, not a MacPorts problem, except all these problems first arose when I installed MacPorts for the first time. I have made a couple of DVDs with my wanted data and am about to start the disc scrub.

It is where I would start for certain.

> 	But if you can point me at some accurate hardware diagnostics I would like that very much. Here's my numbers;
> Hardware UUID:	57C6C486-5B2B-5CC5-BC10-594951CDE5E6

Apple hardware test, and also memtester, which there is a port for, and I'm sure someone here could build you a copy for your architecture.  memtester will take overnight to run to perform a good test if this is indeed hardware related.

You can also check your hard drive, which I have found that converting a DVD to any other video format, jacking up the settings very high, will yield a good CPU test, and also a great way to work your hard drive if you can set it to render out a ridiculously large file.
-- 
Scott (* For off-list contact, replace talklists@ with scott@ *)