DISCLAIMER: This is a continuing series detailing the painful story of a DIY render farm build. It is terribly technics and
somewhat frustrating. Those who are unprepared for such “entertainment” are advised to ignore these posts.
PDC on Leopard
I was still trying to get the PDC worked out. I’ve realized that there are so many dead-ends in the current setup, maybe I’ll profit more by going to OSX 10.5, which is still pretty old, but is the last Mac OS that runs on the old PPC architecture.
I reinstalled the OS, this time with 10.5 Leopard. It seemed to be friendlier with Dr. Queue, and the scant information I had about building Dr. Queue (the documentation is – how shall we put it? Not the best…) seems to suggest that 10.5 will be an easier process. Yes, 10.4 is probably faster on the Mini, but the PDC is not supposed to be that smart, nor that fast, and doesn’t really have all that much to do. Probably the slight slowdown from 10.5 will not be noticed.
I go to work on the usual setup:
- Updated everything to 10.5.8, the last version of 10.5. Luckily all the “latest” versions of different operating systems still reside on the Apple servers for just this kind of occasion.
- Reinstalled Xcode tools. Version 3.2 seems to be right for this version of the OS.
- Because I’m hopeful, I set the Samba server on the Mini to be on at all times. This is so that the first worker machine can see it when it boots up.
But for some reason the Samba server FAILS. I guess we’re Mac only so why not use AFP, the Apple File Protocol? That starts up just fine, and I verify that the worker machine can see the Mini, which I have christened “Cyclops” for reasons completely unknown. Maybe I figure in the valley of the blind the one-eyed jack is king. - MacPorts must be cleaned off entirely and reinstalled. So I removed all parts, installed it fresh.
- Installed scons but it was already there! I never seem to have cleaned this properly. This problem would show up later a few times, but at this moment I had no idea.
- Attempted to install GTK2 under 10.5…
This involves setting the command:
sudo port install gtk2
And then leaving my office. I’ll see next time I show up what happened.