One of those instances where you thank your stars you did an Archive & Install.
Final Cut’s Compressor needs Qmaster to be running in the background to arbitrate rendering jobs – even if you’re the only machine on the network. Lots of babies get thrown out with the bathwater when you do a operating system upgrade (including some X11 essentials like xinit and startx – more on that later), and migrating your big cat from Tiger to Leopard is no different. Compressor is one of the casualties. There are 4 files in /usr/sbin/ that get tossed: qmastera, qmasterd, qmasterprefs and qmasterqd.
If you did an Archive & Install, you can fish those babies out from /Previous Systems/<YYYY-MM-DD_XXXX>/usr/sbin, but you’ll probably need some Terminal skills.
Strangely enough, the startup launch scripts in /Library/StartupItems/Qmaster will probably still be there, so you can either reboot or again in the Terminal, “sudo /Library/StartupItems/Qmaster start” should get it running again.
Also, perhaps this works but I haven’t tried it. Anyone?
Well, this is weird. A recent bug in the OSX 10.5 Unit Convertor Dashboard Widget which some believe was introduced by the Safari 4 beta has caused millions of dollars to go missing. Okay, not really. Just me thinking I was losing my mind when trying to convert currencies.
The fix has been documented on Mac OSX Hints.
Continued from How Apple Enriches My Life…
So no less than 24 hours later, I’m called by the Apple Store, Regent Street, and informed that the replacement optical drive has arrived and is awaiting my return to have it put in. I was told that if I didn’t think I could make it in the requisite 7 days I could just call and tell them when I could and they’d hold the part.
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I use my Macbook Pro constantly. My freelance work demands having a computer available all the time (I’m a tech guy for hire – I used to do systems admin full-time). I had a desktop workstation at one point which I built from scratch and I also had a Dell Inspiron 7500 way back. What a back-breaker that was. The MBP is a great machine – solid, powerful and decked out with plenty of peripheral ports (it’s a 2007 model). Since I knew I’d be using it so much, I wanted to minimize any risk of downtime. So I bought the AppleCare extended 3-year warranty. Yeah, I know…it’s a questionable move. But I had a similar extended warranty with the Inspiron back in 2000 and I didn’t regret it. Like, what do you do when the keyboard falls apart? Or the optical drive stops working…
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