gross error

[John B Brown]

On 7/8/10 10:20 PM, Scott Haneda wrote:
> 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.

	Only after I removed the firmware password did the number two install 
disc boot into the hardware test. After a very long time (I awoke about 
five hours later) there was a message that all was OK.

	As CPU tests go is the install disk test accurate? It's good to remove 
any misleading indicators. That's how Occam's Razor finds real culprits.

	Shalom,

	John B. Brown.
	[jbb at vcn.com]
	358 High Street,
	Buffalo, Wyoming
	82834

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