Journal: News & Comment

Important incompatibility note for Apple Bleeper and CountDown�G5

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Now that the two products have been formally announced, I can note that I have been beta-testing both CountDown G5 and Apple's Bleeper extension for GarageBand, and there is currently an incompatibility between the two.

If you have a Power Mac G5 with CountDown G5 installed, and booted into Mac OS X (obviously, since GarageBand won't run under Mac OS 9), GarageBand quits unexpectedly (with a very loud bleep!) if Bleeper is installed. Bleeper installs just fine on a CountDown-enabled system, but there is no way to get GarageBand running afterwards.

Unfortunately, Bleeper doesn't provide an easy uninstall capability—you need to delete the contents of /Library/Application Support/Bleeper, as well as the /Applications/Bleeper folder, to get things back to normal. CountDown G5 can't be uninstalled because it is a firmware update.

Of course, Apple won't help you, since CountDown is completely unsupported and, as the TidBITS article noted, likely voids your G5 warranty anyway.

So, be warned! And remember that today is an especially important day to bleep safely.

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