Scraping the Cube: Part III, You Must Upgrade to Overwrite. Maybe.
alynch has been offering a long series of useful suggestions. Among them, he told me to slow down the burn speed on the Ubuntu CD. Indeed, that made it possible for the Cube to mount the CD and browse its files. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get it to boot from the CD. I've tried holding "C", but from watching the wireless receiver's status light, I think it's cutting out at the critical point in the process. The Ubuntu CD now shows up in the "Startup Disk" control panel, but clicking on it gets me a warning that it doesn't have a valid System Folder. I don't have to tell you that Macs never trust their users, so that's not working.
I started to wonder if maybe I needed to upgrade the motherboard firmware. A little poking found that the latest version for G4 Macs is 4.2.8. Wouldn't you know, though, that you can't install the new firmware unless the computer is already running at least System 9.1. The cube has 9.0.4. Whee! Would you believe I didn't know that 9.0.4 can be freely upgraded to 9.1 with a download? And from there it can be upgraded to 9.2.2 with another? I downloaded the seventy-five megabyte 9.0.x->9.1 upgrader and set it loose. It failed because one of the embedded .img files wasn't a valid image. Huh. It then asked me if I wanted to continue the upgrade or not. Uh, no? After a reboot, the "About this computer" now reports 9.1, but did it really make it all the way there?
I almost tried to run the 4.2.8 firmware update, but I found something in the README that suggested the Cube wouldn't take it. 4.1.9 was the latest version that would work on the Cube. It took me a few minutes to find that download because searching for 4.1.9 was getting me the 4.2.8 page mentioning 4.1.9. When 4.1.9 unpacked, it explicitly billed itself as a Cube updater, and the README instructions were obviously cube-specific. Hooray! I ran the program, but it immediately terminated with a -199 error. Yes, of course! My favorite! I was on the phone with mab42 at the time. He suggested that I needed to clear up the first 198 errors before it could proceed. "No, I need to clear up the first negative 198 errors first."
A sane person would give up now, but working with computers saps the serenity to accept it when a computer won't behave. So the next thing to try will be using a wired keyboard to try to force the CD boot. Stay tuned for the unlikely-to-be-thrilling conclusion!
I started to wonder if maybe I needed to upgrade the motherboard firmware. A little poking found that the latest version for G4 Macs is 4.2.8. Wouldn't you know, though, that you can't install the new firmware unless the computer is already running at least System 9.1. The cube has 9.0.4. Whee! Would you believe I didn't know that 9.0.4 can be freely upgraded to 9.1 with a download? And from there it can be upgraded to 9.2.2 with another? I downloaded the seventy-five megabyte 9.0.x->9.1 upgrader and set it loose. It failed because one of the embedded .img files wasn't a valid image. Huh. It then asked me if I wanted to continue the upgrade or not. Uh, no? After a reboot, the "About this computer" now reports 9.1, but did it really make it all the way there?
I almost tried to run the 4.2.8 firmware update, but I found something in the README that suggested the Cube wouldn't take it. 4.1.9 was the latest version that would work on the Cube. It took me a few minutes to find that download because searching for 4.1.9 was getting me the 4.2.8 page mentioning 4.1.9. When 4.1.9 unpacked, it explicitly billed itself as a Cube updater, and the README instructions were obviously cube-specific. Hooray! I ran the program, but it immediately terminated with a -199 error. Yes, of course! My favorite! I was on the phone with mab42 at the time. He suggested that I needed to clear up the first 198 errors before it could proceed. "No, I need to clear up the first negative 198 errors first."
A sane person would give up now, but working with computers saps the serenity to accept it when a computer won't behave. So the next thing to try will be using a wired keyboard to try to force the CD boot. Stay tuned for the unlikely-to-be-thrilling conclusion!