Opening screen: "Welcome to Darwin"

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Level 1

5 points

Opening screen: "Welcome to Darwin"

Hi. First time post. I installed Tiger on my iMac 700 Mhz PowerPC G3 about two years ago. At the time, it was the earliest model still meeting the minimum requirements for Tiger. It ran beautifully until yesterday. I downloaded all the system updates as they became available, up to and including 10.4.11. Yesterday I downloaded an update without looking too closely at what was included—I just remember that Quicktime was there (also Java, I think). Anyway, after shutting down and rebooting, I no longer got the OSX screen, but instead got "Welcome to Darwin" and something that looked like DOS. I was able to enter my user name and password but could get no further since I didn't know any of the commands. Borrowing my daughter's laptop, I was able to at least find out that Darwin is the underlying software for OSX (didn't help me much!) So I booted up from my original Tiger disks and ran the disk repair utility. First I verified that there were some issues, but the repair, though successful, didn't fix the Darwin opening screen. Finally, in desperation (I really needed to use my computer), I reinstalled my original version of Tiger, so now I'm back to running 10.4.3. It seems to be going okay.
So here are my questions:
Why did this happen? A simple explanation will do—I'm not very technically oriented, but I'd like to know what's going on.
Should I update from 10.4.3 back up to 10.4.10 (or even 10.4.11)?
Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

iMac 700 MHz PowerPC G3, Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Posted on Feb 8, 2008 11:00 AM

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Answer 1

smithrj

Level 4

1,541 points

Feb 8, 2008 12:34 PM in response to cheakamus

This is Terminals opening statement. See if the application is on and turn it off, even if you must force quit. This is what it is though.

Ray

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Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

Feb 8, 2008 12:42 PM in response to cheakamus

You can most likely prevent this in the future by Verifing/Repairing the HD once in awhile... if a disk is messed up in any way, no telling what/where the next write to the HD will do.

Then, Repair Permissions before & after every update/upgrade, otherwise you could end up with mixed OS versions.

I also never rely on Software Update, only to see what is needed, then I get it at apple>downloads.

Mac OS X 10.4.10 Combo Update (PPC)...
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosx_updates/macosx10410comboupdat eppc.html

The 10.4.11 combo update for PowerPC-based Macs...
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosx10411comboupdateppc.html

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Answer 3

Feb 8, 2008 12:46 PM in response to cheakamus

Some times you may need to run Disk Utility repair more than once, as some new errors are discovered when others are repaired. Go through the repair process until no errors are found.

During a software update, don't run any other tasks on the computer until it finishes completely. You might be able to find the combo updater to take you directly to 10.4.11 from the Apple Support web rather than downloading all the individual updates.

Get an external FW drive and make a bootable backup clone, then when you have a problem you can just boot from the external drive and restore your system.

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Answer 4

cheakamus Author

Level 1

5 points

Feb 8, 2008 1:33 PM in response to Glen Doggett

Thank you all. I had never heard of "Terminal" before, but Spotlight confirms that I do in fact have it on my machine. It isn't running, as far as I know (i.e. no active icon in the dock). I'll read up more on it later.
I have now (apparently successfully) updated back to 10.4.11. I found I wasn't able to use some of my existing versions of software (e.g. iTunes) with 10.4.3. After updating I again ran disk utility and verified the disk—it was okay—and the permissions. The latter had issues, so I fixed that too, and now I'm hopeful I'll have no further problems. I'll continue to perform disk and permission verifications at frequent intervals in the future. Thanks again!

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Answer 5

Feb 8, 2008 9:59 PM in response to cheakamus

FYI - The Mac OS X User Interface itself is an application that runs on top of the underlying UNIX system. You can interact with the UNIX system through the text terminal shell environment through /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app or in an xterm under /Applications/Utilities/X11.app an optional install on the OS X DVD.

The Welcome to Darwin message appears when you enter that UNIX environment, which is basically the contents of a file /etc/motd or the message of the day, administrators can modify this to tell people important news or whatever when they log in. So when you had booted into the UNIX system something was preventing the Mac OS X user login application from starting up, but the UNIX system started up and printed the /etc/motd to the screen. Normally you don't see this text terminal window because the Mac OS X should start automatically in the boot process.

What's useful about all that and why would you care? Well, there are many freely available software applications for GNU Linux systems that can also run on the Darwin environment of Mac OS X, a package manager is a utility that helps you install these, check out the fink package manager if you are interested,

http://www.finkproject.org/

to compile packages from source code you need to install the optional Developer Tools, X11 and X11 SDK from the Mac OS X install DVD. Some GNU linux software is also available as a binary download ready to run under Mac OS X, with no package manager or command-line shell terminal required.

http://www.openoffice.org/
http://www.macgimp.org/
http://www.gimpshop.com/

Most will run in 10.3 or 10.4, not sure about updates for 10.5 yet...

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