Installing PICAXE and USB Driver on PPC Mac

I am trying to install PICAXE on my old PPC Mac - it's a G4 with 1GB RAM and OS X 10.5

AXE027 USB Cable
I installed the AXE027 driver for PPC Mac then went into Terminal and typed in the commands given in the instructions:
cd /dev
ls-l
The second command did not work - I think it is supposed to be "ls -l" although the result of simply typing "ls" gave me a listing that looked like what I was looking for. Except tty.usbserial-xxxxxxxx was not there (but tty.modem and a long listing of other tty_ items were listed).

I found the driver on the install path given "/system/library/extensions" and checked its permissions and the group "wheel" was granted read-only rights.

I opened the Network System Preferences but there was no notice about a new service available.

AXEPad
I downloaded the AXEPad software labeled "MacAXEpadPPC (Mac OSX, PPC, 10.4+)" from http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/ and ran the software but got an error message that the software would not run on my hardware architecture. Are there limitations other than the processor and OS that prevent it from working on my Mac? I did have a copy of the Intel Mac version on the drive and this is the error I would expect from running that software but I was careful to launch the correct version.


Thanks in advance for your help!

I believe MacAXEpad should run on OSX 10.4 upwards but it may not be compatible with all configurations. What did the error message say in full when it said your hardware architecture was not suitable ?

I'm not in front of the Mac right now but I recall that the message was not specific. Just a vague - "will not work with the architecture of this computer" message without a reference to processor, RAM OS, etc.

As described in the first part of my question, I did not yet have a serial connection available. Could that be the problem it is complaining about?

No, not having a serial port / driver installed should not be a problem in letting the program run, as far as I am aware. This sounds more like an OS, installer, program launcher or the application support libraries reporting that the system is incompatible with the program's requirements. I will see what I can find out relating to such issues.

I solved my problems:
1) Print out instructions and stare at them until the step that you missed jumps out at you! (E.g. Plug in the cable before checking the dev directory).
2) The correct terminal command is ls -l with a space between the ls and the -l. It's just a typo in the directions.
3) If it looks like the intel version of axepad and smells like the intel version and runs like the intel version maybe it IS the intel version! I downloaded the software again and it runs just fine.

Thanks for being there Hippy!

You're welcome, and I'm pleased you solved the problem.

I forgot to say Welcome to the PICAXE Forum. If you do hit any issues, just shout and we'll do our best to get you on the right track. Good luck with your PICAXE projects.