[Silly Burrito]

I finally bought my first Mac last week. I've had it hooked up to my TV in the living room, but today, my Windows PC's RAM fried the motherboard (I guess it was jealous). So, I brought the mini in my office to hook it up to my NEC Accusync 90 and Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W. However, there are two problems that I hope someone can help me with.

1. When booting the Mini, the display makes a rapid clicking noise like it's going through the resolutions. It will occasionally display a half blue/half garbled screen, then go back to the clicking. Only when I turn the monitor off then on again will it work. When I click Detect Displays (right now it's saying VGA), it goes through the same behavior, but it does detect that it's an Accusync 90. However, the computer effectively freezes then, and force quit does not help. How can I get my Mini to recognize my Accusync without flipping off the monitor every time?

2. The 1350W may be a Windows only printer from what I understand. There are no driver downloads on the site for OS X. However, I've found something that would allow this printer to print in Linux called Min12XXW. The instructions that I've found are for Red Hat. Does anyone know how to install this using OS X?

Any help will be appreciated!
Keith

[Maneki Neko]

As for #2, it sounds doable, but you'll need to compile the driver yourself and use it with CUPS. If you download the driver from min12xxw and decompress it, there's a README and FAQ in there.

[seanc]

Hi,

To get the printer working in os x, you could try the generic post script driver since it's only a black and white printer, or if it's got a usb connection, see if mac os x detects it and installs it, and see what driver it is using. That mini12xxw driver seems like it should work, I read something on a forum that says someone is using it successfully in os x with your printer.

The monitor will be a bit more tricky. Doing a google search i've found that it is a 19" inch crt monitor. I don't know what type of office you work in, but it seems like the only option would be to ask the IT department (if you have one) for a different type of 19" monitor. If worst comes to worst, you can always try and see if one of your co-workers will swap their monitor, of course this would only be a good idea if they had a 19" that was as good as yours but a different brand.
One last option, switch on the mac, wait a few seconds and then switch on the monitor.

Sean

[Silly Burrito]

Sean, thanks for your advice, but I don't know how to install the generic driver. I've compiled the min12xxw, but I don't know how to get OS X to see it as a driver. I've downloaded the PPD file, but it still won't print..I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, I just don't know what.

[seanc]

Ok.

The printer.
Do you have a usb printer at home? If you do, you should be able to detatch the cable and then take it into work. Depending on how far you are away from the printer, either your mini or the printer may have to go on a trip so that they are next to each other. Connect the usb cable between the mini and the printer, then go into the printer setup preferences. Hopefully the mac mini will have detected the printer. Since there are no Minolta drivers for os x it should have been detected as the generic post script driver. Try and print a few pages of various different documents and see what happens. Hopefully it should print ok.
If the mac mini doesn't detect the printer, then you have to assume that they will never work without the mini12xx driver.

When installing any printer, you should select the printer and see a pull down box towards the bottom of the window. Select the generic post script driver from that. I think you may be able to tell the mac to look in a location so you can select the ppd driver.

I don't know how to install the ppd driver, so you'll have to look on the internet.
You may have better luck posting this in the peripherals forum.

Sean

[tooki]

These are both questions about peripherals (not about the Mac mini itself), so I'm moving this thread.

tooki