Apple 10.6.3 Snow Leopard Update Trouble

Upon trying to upgrade to the newest major update by Apple for OS X to 10.6.3 I had nothing but trouble.  Some Macs upgrade fine.  Others do not.

I always download the full combo update since I have hundreds of Macs to update it saves lots of time and bandwidth to just download the full update one time instead of a smaller update over and over again.  The combo update for the client is 713 MB.

When running it on my favorite iMac 24 which I use as my main workstation the GUI installer would fail within the first minute of the install during the “writing files” stage and had some useless error saying the installer had failed and that I needed to contact the software manufacturer (in this case Apple).  I tried all sorts of things and scoured the Internet as well as Apple’s site looking for help but since the update is so new there is very little info out there.  Hopefully this will help you if you’re having the same trouble!

Yet Another System Utility

I cleaned temp files and dumped cache folders and tried multiple accounts and ran cleanup utilities including YASU (http://jimmitchell.org/yasu/) which all helped the system but didn’t do anything for the update.  I even ran the software updater from the command line using “sudo softwareupdate -i -a” but all failed.

After about an hour of searching I found that if I didn’t close the installer after the error I could go to the menu bar and view the log file.  Silly me I knew it was there!  The log file told me that there was an error 23, too many open files in system.  There is very little info on this error 23 except that it is indeed too many open files in the system.  So after some more investigation I found the sysctl command.  By using sysctl kern.maxfiles you can see what your system is set at as far as the maximum allowed open files.  My iMac was at 2000 which seemed like more than enough but this was largest update I had attempted and I have LOTS of software on my iMac.  So I changed that value to 5000 using the command “sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=5000″.  Understand this is done either under sudo or sudo su in a terminal window.

After changing the maxfiles to 5000 the updater ran without a hitch!  I’m not sure if I need to set that value back to 2000 but I’m going to leave it at 5000 since there should be plenty of system resources to handle it.  If I start to see system performance issues I will set it back to 2000.  I know most Linux systems are well under 1000 and some under 500 for max files so 5000 seems like overkill.

Please leave a comment if this fixed your issue or contact me if you need additional help!!

Popularity: 100% [?]

MacBook Pro Model A1211

I’ve now upgraded three of these MacBook Pro model A1211 Apple Laptops with extra RAM and a faster hard drive.  I’m as pleased with the results as when I did the first upgrade!!  The performance gains have been astonishing. If you haven’t yet, read my article about the performance change before and after the upgrade in the Upgrade your Macbook Pro article.

The machine I’m writing this on was a real pig and always seemed even slower than same generation Macbooks (although I’m sure that had to be in my mind).  Now it’s snappy and responsive even running both Windows 7 in VMWare along with all the other stuff I’m doing.

This particular upgrade means going from 2 gb of RAM to 4 and swapping out the old Hitachi 160 gb 5400 rpm drive for a faster and larger Seagate 250 gb 7200 rpm drive.

The hardware upgrade is fairly easy on this model.  Just remove about 20 screws and the keyboard/trackpad assembly lifts up to expose the hard drive.  Disconnect a few cables, remove a few more screws and swap in the new HDD.  It’s of course the exact same size, just better.  Button everything back up.

One of the most recent ones need the OS installed on it from scratch so I just went about installing Snow Leopard on that one.  The second was a true upgrade and I needed to move all the data over to the new drive.  I have a USB HDD adapter that allows you to connect either a full size or laptop size HDD to the computer via a USB port.  Doing this allowed me to boot to the original HDD.  Once in the OS I used the Disk Utility to initialize and partition the new HDD.  Then I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy all the info onto the new drive.  Once it was complete (about one hour for 50 GB) I shutdown the Macbook, disconnected the USB HDD and booted normally into the OS.

Viola!  Full upgrade in about an hour and half.  The cost was about $150 per unit with shipping and all.  This is a small investment towards a computer that will last several more years!  My recommendation- upgrade your Macbook Pro.  Do it NOW!

Popularity: 38% [?]

XBOX 360 Torn Apart

My nephew’s XBOX 360 had the dreaded Red-Ring-of-Death.  This is a common problem on the XBOX 360 that Microsoft claims only they can fix.  I just cracked open the box, removed the heatsinks and reseated them after cleaning the terrible heatsink compound that MS uses from the factory.  I used Arctic Silver heatsink compound which I always use on anything I build because it does a fantastic job.  That’s all there is to it!

Popularity: 36% [?]

Battlefield Bad Company 2

I bit the bullet and purchased a GameFly account.  The first game I rented was Battlefield Bad Company 2 because the multiplayer looked awesome.  I was all set to have some people over for the local split screen multiplayer like Halo and Call of Duty because they are so much fun to do a system link and get 6-8 people killing eachother.  But NOooo!  Battlefield Bad Company 2 does not have local splitscreen.  The only way you can multiplayer is online with Microsoft XBOX Live and even then every game I tried to play couldn’t find a host game (most likely since it’s fairly new and it was a Thursday night).

Of course nobody I know has this game so multiplayer is out of the question!  Plus who can afford to have 8 friends (or more) buy a $60 game just so you can multiplayer?!?  The campaign is awesome and the game play is superb with fantastic weapon choice and great vehicles but it’s not worth buying in my mind.  I’m glad I rented because this is one I would have bought and been very disappointed in feeling like it was not worth the money.  But for those of you who like the campaigns better than multiplayer or if all you want to do is online live multiplayer then this game will rock your world!  I’m just not that type.

Popularity: 35% [?]

I’ve been looking for an alternative to Microsoft Publisher since the dawn of time…  Ok not quite but I’ve often thought that if an alternative existed the school could drop the $7000 per year cost of maintaining Microsoft Office.  The Macs could run Neo Office and the PCs could run OpenOffice.  Or both could run OpenOffice.

The two main advantages are cost and familiarity.  The cost is, of course, free.  Being that OpenOffice is cross platform is a big advantage because the interface is identical no matter if it’s Windows or Linux or Mac.  Currently we have Microsoft Office 2007 on the Windows computers and Microsoft Office 2008 on the Macs.  While MS claims them to be the same, they are not.  The interface is very different and MS doesn’t offer Publisher on the Mac side.

Scribus- alternative to MS Publisher?

The biggest holdup has been publisher because so many teachers use it to create newsletters to send home.  I’ve been waiting for a good alternative to present itself and while OpenOffice doesn’t yet have a clear cut choice it appears that another open source package, Scribus, might do the trick.  At least during my five minute trial and test of features it appears to work very much the same.  It doesn’t have some of the polish and word wrap appears to be funky but it does do many of the things the teachers want and think they need.

This discovery will weigh heavy on my mind as I try to investigate the possibility of eliminating MS Office from the school’s standard software and by doing so save over $6000 per year!

Popularity: 35% [?]

I upgraded my Dell XPS M1210 laptop from Linux Mint 7 Gloria to Linux Mint 8 Helena last night. This was all done from the terminal while running version 7 and it amazes me how well the upgrade does. Even though Mint recommends downloading the 8 install CD and doing a complete wipe and fresh install I decided to try the upgrade solution. I figured if anything went wrong I would then do the full wipe.

This was the proceedure:
Open a terminal and type the following commands:

• gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list (Change all occurrences of “gloria” to “helena”, and all occurences of “jaunty” to “karmic”, remove the lines for the Community section of the Linux Mint repository, then save the file and close the editor)
• apt update
• apt install mint-info-main (choose “Y” or “I” to install the package maintainer’s version)
• apt install mint-meta-main(choose “Y” or “I” to install the package maintainer’s version)

In the terminal, repeat the following commands until both upgrade commands show no upgrades available:

• apt upgrade
• apt dist-upgrade
• apt install mint-meta-main

I had to reinstall Firefox for some reason.  Perhaps something went wrong with the upgrade from 3.0 to 3.5.  I had Google Chrome open at the time of the upgrade because I was surfing while the downloads and upgrading was going on.

Not a lot of major changes.  Clearly a nice new theme and wallpaper with a new icon set and some of the dialog boxes have added features like the popup screens telling you about your wireless network status have a timer wheel letting you see visually how log they will remain visible before automatically vanishing as well as an option to always hide the message in the future.

I’ve been running Mint since version 6 and for over 4 years on this particular laptop with stellar results.  It hasn’t crashed and I can perform any and all tasks I need to do.  I’m very pleased!

Popularity: 34% [?]

Today Shantelle played her last peewee basketball game. This could potentially be her last peewee game ever unless the school district decides to get rid of 6th grade sports next year. Unfortunately they lost to Granby but the coaches said they had a great season and everybody loved practice and the games. I’ll post some pics later.

Popularity: 35% [?]

Shortly after we had a nice snow storm dropping 6-8 inches of snow the following two days were colder than -20 degrees F. I love it when it snows because it’s not nearly as cold. I’m tired of the bitter cold winters. Maybe it’s time to look into moving somewhere warmer- like Alaska.

Popularity: 36% [?]

I was fixing pizza for supper tonight and since we have a large family I had to fix two, as I always do. Reading the back of the boxes I couldn’t find the directions for cooking two pizzas at once. Upon closer inspection I read, “for instructions on cooking two pizzas at once visit our website at digorno.com.”

Give me a break! Put the directions on the fricken box!

Popularity: 38% [?]