Mavericks Black Screen with Cursor (mouse)

Just encountered two Mac Mini's which, when turned on, show a black screen with a cursor which moves when you move the mouse. cmd + alt + esc doesn't do anything.

Tried:

1. reset PRAM
2. SafeBoot (hold down shift)
3. hold down cmd + s and type "/sbin/fsck -yf"

I gave up and reimaged these macs.

Did a bit of research afterwards and found this apple discussions on it. There were two suggested fixes. One involved blindly logging in which isn't an ICT Technician friendly fix. However, Spiro.r suggested:

1. ssh 192.160.0.1 -l username
2. sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist
3. sudo rm /Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist
4. sudo rm /private/var/db/.AppleUpgrade
5. reboot


As ssh is by default turned off, you could also do this in single user mode (hold down cmd + s).

Apparently it is a problem with updates. It basically wants you to log in and OK an update, but seems to stop the login screen appearing. Not entirely sure anyone knows what's happening, but deleting these preference files and .AppleUpgrade fixes it. I shall try it next time I see it.

installing Octave on Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7

So, just read the wiki here. As it's open source, they havent yet made a pkg installer for it. Apparently, the best thing to do is to use a Package Manager to install it for you.

I've just tried Fink but the website isn't working. Looks like they've moved their website to http://fink.thetis.ig42.org/. Apperantly there's no pkg installer for this either! Here's the download for the binary.

I gave up here and found that MacPorts have an installer.

Installed MacPorts alright, but when I tried to run the command:

sudo port install octave-devel +atlas+docs

It came up with the error not knowing what the command "port" was. I had to type in:

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH

One prerequisite is to have xcode installed.

Having done all this, still came up with an error:

Error: Port octave-devel not found

I think it's because we have a proxy server which looks like complicated to add to MacPorts!

Oh well, might just try Matlab! (student version £55!)


....... a little time later......

So I'm now trying at home on OS X 10.7.5

Installed MacPorts
trying to install octave but comes up with:

Error: Port octave not found

Turns out you have to selfupdate MacPort in order for it to sync something or other. Type:

sudo port -v selfupdate

This then came up with the error:

rsync: failed to connect to rsync.macports.org: Connection refused (61)

rsync error: error in socket IO (code 10) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-42/rsync/clientserver.c(105) [receiver=2.6.9]

Command failed: /usr/bin/rsync -rtzv --delete-after rsync://rsync.macports.org/release/tarballs/base.tar /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/tarballs

Exit code: 10

Error: /opt/local/bin/port: port selfupdate failed: Error synchronizing MacPorts sources: command execution failed

Doh! Just did a search and found this. Turns out I have PeerGuardian running. Turned it off and ran selfupdate again which worked fine. So, next I tried installing octave again:

sudo port install octave

--->  Computing dependencies for octave

Error: Dependency 'atlas' not found.

Doh! I read this article which tells how other people are having the same trouble. Looks like one of the sync files on a server must be wrong. selfupdating port at some point will fix it;

sudo port -v selfupdate
sudo port install octave +accelerate +gcc45

What do you know? It worked!!