[Flexradio] flex 5000a +i mac 2.93

[Brian Lloyd]

On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Mike Schwendeman <mike at s3com.net> wrote:
> 2. flex 5000a +i mac 2.93 (elan paim)
>>
>> hello is any one out there use the? I-?Mac+ flex 5000a ?
>> i know about[ boot camp]how the FLEX 5000A working with the i mac the new
>> i mac i think support fire wire of 400 to 800 . any problem with this combo
>> ?
>> i ask this before i will buy the i mac . i thank you all for your great
>> support Elan g0uut/dl9fcc
>>
>> E&T Paim
>>
>> ------------------------------
>
> Good day, Elan;
>
> I share your apprehension in making a Mac work with a Flex-Radio and
> PowerSDR. For me, it was a difficult task, simply because I had chosen the
> incorrect Firewire device to disable in my XP operating environment. I had
> followed a proceedure on the Flex-Radio KB (knowledge base), but the words
> in the original proceedure were different (did not match what was seen in
> the DEVICE MANAGER) to the point that I wasted a lot of days and hours,
> before I accidentally discovered the correct method.
>
> I had since contacted the originator of the Boot Camp install that would
> allow PowerSDR and the like to function on a Mac. I had offered the changes
> to this otherwise excellent document; -As yet, I do not see any modification
> or update, so I will simply copy the text of the now-modified proceedure
> below. I do hope that this will be of help to you. (Using this modified
> proceedure, I have been successful in installing the needed drivers and
> PowerSDR on two iMacs and one MacBook Pro.)

Actually Mike, you don't need to disable any of the devices at all to
get the software to install and start working. One needs to start
disabling devices only if one runs into DPC latency problems. Until
then,let sleeping dogs lie. :-) I probably should not have put
anything in there about disabling things until after all the software
was installed and working.

>From what I can tell without testing, your instructions below look
reasonable and your comments are, in many cases, ones I would take for
granted, e.g. you can use XP SP3 instead of XP SP2. I did not have an
XP SP3 distro to test with so I made my instructions to match what I
had. I tried to annotate issues and problems I ran into so that
someone following the same roadmap would arrive in the same place.
Start from somewhere else and most of it will be germane, just not
identical. (BTW, Apple makes a point that you need to start with XP
SP2 or later in order to load XP on BootCamp so that is why I included
that info.)

As for disabling devices, I never actually disabled the devices in
hardware for those instructions. I disabled the 1394 Ethernet as an
ethernet device in the network connections control panel, not in the
actual physical devices section of My Computer. I suspect your way is
more complete. I was trying to stay away from things that might make
Windows stop working in case of a mistake.

So, all of these instructions are guidelines for people to use when
trying to make their computers work with their radios. I agree it can
be a bit tough for people who are Mac-oriented to have to suddenly
deal with some of the intricacies of Windows under-the-hood. Sometimes
you just have to flounder a bit in order to find The Way. I know I
did. But I did spend some time trying to drop some bread crumbs along
the way.

Oh, and one last thing -- Flex doesn't want to treat the Mac as a
supported platform. They claim that the Mac's boot-ROM/BIOS is not
PC-standard and you can't just load and run Windows on an
Intel-powered Apple Mac. They may be right. I have never tried it. I
can't imagine a Mac that only runs Windows so I wouldn't. Everyone I
know gets Windows running on a Mac by using either BootCamp or one of
the virtualization packages, e.g. VMWare, Parallels, etc.
Unfortunately FireWire is not supported under the latter packages so
if one is planning to run a Flex 5000/3000 they are going to need to
load Windows under BootCamp.

So, if we want to continue this discussion we should move it to the
Flex-edge reflector where all the new software is discussed.

> 73! -Mike- KOJTA

-- 
73 de Brian, WB6RQN/J79BPL