ATTENTION Current Mac mini/A+ users: Boot Mavericks from an SD card, load a RAMdisk, dismount your internal SATA drives, and pour a drink for the musicians walking out of your speakers!

[alsterfan]

Hi Le Concombre Masqué,

 

Having succeeded in following a lot of your suggestions one message is somewhat annoying when I start iTunes saying "You cannot connect to the iTunes Store as a special file is missing."

 

Any idea of stopping this message from starting?

 

Regards,

Uwe

[Le Concombre Masqué]

I guess you refer to my posts in the Thread: OSX Optimisation from scratch

 

I'm not using iTunes at all on my SD card...However, if I may help, without guarantee ... I would try to reload com.apple.security.cloudkeychainproxy.plist

Hi Le Concombre Masqué,

 

Having succeeded in following a lot of your suggestions one message is somewhat annoying when I start iTunes saying "You cannot connect to the iTunes Store as a special file is missing."

 

Any idea of stopping this message from starting?

 

Regards,

Uwe

[alsterfan]

I would try to reload com.apple.security.cloudkeychainproxy.plist

 

Thank you. Unfortunately it did not help, but never mind.

 

Regards, Uwe

[goldsdad]

Thank you. Unfortunately it did not help, but never mind.

 

Regards, Uwe

 

If you have no intention of using iTunes Store, try going to the Parental tab of iTunes Preferences and disabling iTunes Store.

[alsterfan]

If you have no intention of using iTunes Store, try going to the Parental tab of iTunes Preferences and disabling iTunes Store.

 

Hi Goldsdad,

 

Thanks for your suggestion. Unfortunately it didn´t help either. I´m sure the message has to do something with one of the numerous services I deactivated. If I am in the mood to reinstall Yosemite again I will pay attention especially to this.

 

Regards, Uwe

[Le Concombre Masqué]

how about reloading identityservicesd ?

Hi Goldsdad,

 

Thanks for your suggestion. Unfortunately it didn´t help either. I´m sure the message has to do something with one of the numerous services I deactivated. If I am in the mood to reinstall Yosemite again I will pay attention especially to this.

 

Regards, Uwe

[alsterfan]

how about reloading identityservicesd ?

 

No chance, so for the moment I can live pretty well with this tiny glitch.

It might interest you that the services have gone down to 61. This includes iTunes and La Rosita plugin as well as two disk-images helper services initiated by Jud´s script to start two RAM disks.

Regards, Uwe

[jcpom]

I have been booting OS 10.9.5 with CAD optimization and A+ from SD for a couple of weeks and every so often my MacMini will not boot up. Typically, shutting down and rebooting works, but not always. Any thoughts on what is causing mis-boots?

[Yucca06]

...I can't understand why you feel it's better reading OS from the SD card. I don't say it's wrong, but I'd like to know why. The card readers are directly soldered to the MB (usually on a USB header, but don't know for this one), like USB or thunderbolt, and the SD card has no moving parts. So it should be the same sound with an USB drive, or even an SSD/mSSD directly plugged to Sata (and even better for the lasts, as you can power them separately, but not in a Mini)...

 

Someone could explain ?

[jcpom]

Thanks for your thoughts. I'm trying to isolate my OS to experiment with CAD optimization before using full time on my HDD. At this point, I'm not sure if the mis-boots have to do with CAD or SD. Next step is to undo CAD from SD and see what happens.

[Freann]

@jcpom I see this too. I suspect it is the internal card reader not correctly reading the card. There are lots of videos on Youtube about this. I applied some tape over the lock switch. Seems to help.

[jcpom]

I did push on the card and it did seem to move (slightly). I'll try the tape before reaching conclusion.

[Freann]

It seems to be a major issue, especially on portables. I suspect there is a lot of dust in there... Cleaning time.

[BobL]

Having done the above, I can add three thinks to Pols list:

 

 

1. Headless with monitor emulation

2. LAN filter

3. “External Wifi”

 

 

1. This but on a standard Display port-to-vga adapter:

The 30 Second Dummy Plug

 

 

2. The LAN filter is an Acoustic Revive RLI-1. In my opinion an absolute must. In my setup a much bigger difference than a new USB cable (NordOst Blue Heaven –> Wireworld Platinum Starlight)

 

 

3. The “external wifi” is an older Airport Extreme powered by my JS-2 power supply and configured to be an extension to the existing wifi network. I still use the LAN filter between the mini and the AE.

 

With these three tricks my mini has no galvanic connection to anything except the JS-2. Music is stored on a HD connected to the regular Airport Extreme. With HQPLayer my setup now sounds like a million bucks. Unbelievable.

 

Freann, I understand 2), but it's not cheap, and 3), for which I use an old airport express which does not give me an option of external powering, so I might change this. Which do you think is more significant, the external powering or the filter?

 

However, I am puzzled by 1):

What does it do? With the old Mini 2009 I used something like this in to avoid the "black screen effect", but this has not been a problem with 2010/2012 Minis.

[Freann]

Start with the LAN filter. Whatever you do you will (probably) need it.

 

Headless with monitor emulation: if you run a mac mini completely headless, the CPU will do the GPU’s (video card) job. You will tax the processor and get low framerates. This is a way of tricking the hardware into thinking its connected to a VGA monitor. There are solutions for HDMI, but those little boxes are darn expensive (>$100). The only side effect is resolution maxes out at 1600x1200.

And yes, you can hear the effect of removing yet another connection to a device with a power supply.

[Superdad]

Bob:

I can attest to what Fredrik said about the monitor "dongle", but in a different way:

Even with a 2010 mini I had problems headless--black squares, poor frame rates, and of course limited resolution setting (which is a both as my control monitor on my desk is a 24" at 1920 x 1200). Have not check with my 2012 i7, and I never thought to check SQ in any case.

 

But the device I have used for years works fine, is modestly priced, and does not require a power supply (once you have "flashed" it the first time). These things are considered EDID spoofers. And the one I use from Gefen is the "DVI Detective N" (Gefen, LLC - DVI Detective N). Retail is $79 but they can be found for about $59. With newer minis you would of course need to connect it with either a Apple HDMI>DVI adapter or a MiniDisplayPort>DVI adapter.

 

I too would like to try one (or all) of the three brands of LAN filters, but they all seem hard to get and none are particularly inexpensive. I'm on a tight budget these days with our daughter at UCLA…

 

Cheers,

--Alex C.

[mrvco]

Has anyone here tried the headless adapters from OWC (mini display port) or Compulab (HDMI)?

[BobL]

Thanks Freann and Alex. I thought I had almost run out of (cheap) things to try, but this opens up a lot!

 

I would certainly be interested to hear from others who have experience of using the LAN filter for this purpose, and I guess Alex would too....

 

Bob

[alsterfan]

Hi Alex,

Somewhere else you mentioned that it is (among other things -> SD card, RAM disk) mostly the amount of running services (to be seen in the activity monitor), that matters concerning SQ. It seems to me this is not the whole truth.

I could not refrain from downsizing Yosemite too. So from System/Library/PrefPanes I uninstalled all those programs I did not need for hearing music. Now only 9 are left.

 

Today I had a look at Library/Pereferences and System/Library/CoreServices. Amongst others I put away "SystemAppearance.bundle". After that my SD card booted into an unusable black desktop.

 

Before this, booting was normal, although I had uninstalled "Appearance.prefPane".

If I am not mistaken this means that some services are loaded that don´t show up in the activity monitor.

(Please correct me if I am wrong.)

Because of this here is what I took away as well:

The time to boot Y is not shortened by this. But it is well worth going this way to improve SQ even more.

 

Kind regards, Uwe

[Superdad]

Hi Uwe:

 

Good work there! I think there are a lot of important items (sometimes ktext pieces, sometimes .plist elements) which get briefly loaded to call and run kernel sub-processes (I am sure to be saying this all wrong, but you get the idea). So even though we don't see them on the list of active processes in Activity Monitor, they still load and run when needed. The All Processes view in Activity Monitor coincides more closely with the summary number we see, but I also like to look with the 3rd-party utility LaunchControl. A lot of those .plist files are static and not doing anything until they get called by an actual process. So just deleting them does not stop the process call, it often just breaks it from working right.

Again, I am explaining this badly because I don't really understand how UNIX and OS X works behind the scenes--I am just remembering from what I have seen.

 

I think you (and Concombre and Paul and the rest) are doing a great job trimming OS X down. I hope that in November I will have some time to catch up when I do a first install of Yosemite. You can bet I'll be going back through these threads and compiling a list of processes that can be safely unloaded.

Or perhaps by then Scott and Damian at C.A.D. will have released a first script specific to Yosemite.

 

Have a nice weekend,

 

Alex C.

[alsterfan]

I hope that in November I will have some time to catch up when I do a first install of Yosemite.

Alex C.

 

Hi Alex,

That´s what I hope for you too.

One more point to remark. System/Library/Frameworks also looks enticing. After having tried to kill the first half of these files booting always stopped halfway.

So be careful.

 

Kind regards,

Uwe

[odelay]

Nice work, Uwe - it worked fine on my system :-)

 

as i hse splashtop on my ipad, i left all the network related files in place.

 

I appreciate all the time tinkering time you guys been doing. Thank you.

[goldsdad]

System/Library/Frameworks also looks enticing. After having tried to kill the first half of these files booting always stopped halfway.

 

I hope your occupation isn't brain surgeon.

[BobL]

...I can't understand why you feel it's better reading OS from the SD card. I don't say it's wrong, but I'd like to know why. The card readers are directly soldered to the MB (usually on a USB header, but don't know for this one), like USB or thunderbolt, and the SD card has no moving parts. So it should be the same sound with an USB drive, or even an SSD/mSSD directly plugged to Sata (and even better for the lasts, as you can power them separately, but not in a Mini)...

 

Someone could explain ?

 

There are several people who have more direct experience here than I do. However, I do not think the SD slot shares the USB bus, so it is not exposed to whatever junk is on that. Superdad has suggested on the 2014 mini thread that the PCIe unit in the new machine might have a similar advantage for the same reason.

 

However, ultimately the only 'explanation' is that this is how some people hear it, and it is by no means clear that we have a full understanding of the physics of hearing.

[alsterfan]

I hope your occupation isn't brain surgeon.

Well, I admit it is a tedious affair. But it is worth doing it, even though it can be accompanied by backlashes: Today I could no longer boot my SD card, so my advice:

Don´t touch System/Library/Extensions! unfortunately I cannot tell you the culprit.

However I had a successful look at:

Address Book plugins

Automator

Components

Quick Look

QuickTime

Speech/Synthesizers plus Voices

Spotlight.

If you want to have more details, please have a look here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qisivh1qb6amyqk/more%20deleted%20deleted%20services%20SDHC.zip?dl=0

 

Kind regards,

Uwe