Powerbook G4 Airport reconnect troubles
Yes, macs have problems too....
Although far less troubles seem to appear on my Macs than I had on the ol' windows mayhem, the troubles that do arise are of a kind that leave you in a mess of confusion. So it was when I re-installed my old Powerbook G4 (1.67 GHz, late model) with Leopard (OS X 10.5.6) I was stunned to find that its' overall performance had increased (take that windows users ;)) and I was happily humming and setting up my PB for use as a media-center and fallback machine for browsing and such when somebody else had need for my somewhat more powerful MB Pro...
All was well until I realised that whenever it woke up from sleep the Airport card (wifi, for those who are more open-minded and less apple-centric) wouldn't reconnect automatically. I had no trouble selecting the known network from the drop-down menu, no biggy, except that I wanted the 'media'-centre experience to include using just my mobile over bluetooth to control it and possibly watch the movie trailers, or in the future perhaps even TV over ip?
Google is my friend, I thought and plunged into the myriad threads concerning the airport card and leopard, possibly related only to Powerbooks... There's a lot out there and I'm not quite sure how useful some of the tips are, but I thought I would point out the slow and painful way to a working solution, which came eventually down simply to remove the 'Bluetooth' service from my 'Network location'.
- Zap the pram
- Somewhere, don't ask me where, I found somebody mentioning similar reconnection problems that had supposedly been solved by zapping the pram, since I'm an old-school mac-tech I figured, it can't hurt, it shouldn't help, but it's worth a shot... So, restart the mac (only useful on PowerPC macs I think) and hold CMD-OPTION-P-R until the mac sounds it startup bing for the second time. On a side-note, this did nothing for me...
- Repair Permissions
- When weird things happen, after zapping the pram, we old-school techies always used disk-utilities to repair 'stuff'. In this case I figured it might be a cause, so I went ahead and did it, to no avail
- Move System Preferences back to where it belongs
- Immediately after my clean install I had moved everything that I didn't consider to be an actual 'application' to the 'Applications/Utilities' folder. This to keep the 'Applications' Folder as clean and crisp as possible. I had found a lead that mentioned this as a possible problem when adding preferred networks, so I gave it a shot and moved the 'System Preferences.app' back to its' default location. Again, no luck :(
- Disable Bluetooth
- If you've remembered how I wanted to control this mac, you know I was praying for this not to be the answer... I found a reference in the same thread as the one concerning moving the System Preference app and it sounded very promising. It also worked :( In a way great news, in another way, oh so sucky. So I went ahead and used that analytical programmer brain of mine to come up with something new....
- Remove any unused 'Services' from your 'Network Location'
- Since I had set up a bluetooth connection with my Nokia E70, I realised there might be a bluetooth service added to my Network Location to enable the Mac to connect through my Nokia to the internet. Not something I was ever going to use on that mac, same went for the Firewire service... So, I went and removed all services I wasn't going to use, leaving only the AirPort and Ethernet services, re-enabled the bluetooth adapter and rebooted the PB, it worked!!! Even putting it to sleep and waking back up no longer leaves the PB confused and offline, me happy, me now putting the mac back to playing music and I can get back to work
This in-between-work project wasn't as fast, easy and effortless as I had hoped, but the results are quite satisfying, to anybody with the same problems out there, I hope you'll find this on Google first and will get your troubles done and fixed within 10 minutes ;)