I recently bought an Olympus DS-2200 Voice Recorder for use with an
Apple Powerbook running OS X 10.3.7. After intially trying to get it to
work on the Mac, which it is advertised as being compatible with I had
some problems. I finally fiqured out the issues with very little help
from Olympus and thought that I would post them here, so that people in
the future might not have to go through the hassle that I did. I also
forwarded this to Olympus in hopes that they might add it to their
knowledge base.

---------

The problem that I encountered with my new Olympus DS-2200 Voice
Recorder on Mac OS X 10.3.7 is as follows:

After installing the software that comes on the CDROM and then plugging
my voice recorder into the USB port on my 17" Apple Powerbook, I got an
error, which said, "System extension cannot be used. The system
extension /System/Library/Extensions/OlympusDSSDriver.kext was
installed improperly and cannot be user. Please try reinstalling it, or
contact the product's vendor for an update."

I first checked online for any software updates (Apple or Olympus).
There was one minor Olympus update, so I downloaded and installed it.
But the error still kept occurring, even after system reboots. I called
Olympus and they were beyond unhelpful. They asked me if I had the most
recent version of the software from the website and after that said
that they couldn't help anymore because the DS-2200 is a professional
model and it is only supported by the vendor that sold the product. It
is amazing to me they can stay in business when they snub their
"professional" clients so thoroughly. So anyways, I called the vendor I
purchased the recorder from and they honestly sounded a bit surprised
by Olympus's response to me, but then contacted their distributor to
help me out. While I was waiting for them to get ahold of the
distributor's support personell and call me back, I actually figured
out what the problem was, since I happen to make my living as a
computer professional.

Basically, to troubleshoot it I looked online and found out what
command a user can run to load a kernel extension, so that maybe I
could see the real error that was being generated. I discovered it, and
then started by open up a Terminal window.

At the Terminal window I typed:

sudo kextload -t /System/Library/Extensions/OlympusDSSDriver.kext

This command asked me for my admin password and then produced an error
that basically said:

------
kernel extension OlympusDSSDriver.kext/ has problems:
Authentication failures
{
"File owner/permissions are incorrect" = (
"/System/Library/Extensions/OlympusDSSDriver.kext"
)
}
....stuff ommited...


So I looked at the permissions by typing:

sudo ls -lFa /System/Library/Extensions

and below is some of the resulting output:

....stuff omitted...
drwxr-xr-x 4 root staff 136 21 Jan 13:03 OlympusDSSDriver.kext/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 27 Oct 17:41 PPP.kext/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 27 Sep 2003 PPPSerial.ppp/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 27 Sep 2003 PPPoE.ppp/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 27 Sep 2003 PPTP.ppp/
....stuff omiited....

I noticed that the permission on the OlympusDSSDriver.kext were
root:staff and on all the other files it was root:wheel. This seemed to
sync with the error reported when I tried to load the kernel extension
so I decided to try and change the permissions for
OlympusDSSDriver.kext. Now, Apple's Disk Utility program that comes
with all OS X machines has a repair permissions button, but I tried to
use this, and it did not fix this problem. I have reported this issue
to Apple, so that hopefully they can fix this issue with Disk Utility.
Since I couldn't do it with their tool I went back to the Terminal
window and typed:

sudo chown -R root:wheel
/System/Library/Extensions/OlympusDSSDriver.kext

This worked fine and if I then typed:

sudo kextload -t /System/Library/Extensions/OlympusDSSDriver.kext

I got the following response:

----
kextload: extension OlympusDSSDriver.kext/ appears to be valid
kextload: OlympusDSSDriver.kext/ loaded successfully
----

And after rebooting, plugging in the voice recorder via USB and
starting the DSS Player worked fine, exactly like expected.

It would be really nice, since I've taken the time to type this up, if
Olympus would add this to their knowledge base, so that in the future
if people call with this or a similar issue they can actually help
instead of simply avoiding supporting their "professional" clients who
just spent a small fortune on their equipment.

I hope that this will also be of use to others who experience any
similar issues.


Thanks a lot,
Sean

wrote:
I recently bought an Olympus DS-2200 Voice Recorder for use with an
Apple Powerbook running OS X 10.3.7. After intially trying to get it to
work on the Mac, which it is advertised as being compatible with I had
some problems. I finally fiqured out the issues with very little help
from Olympus and thought that I would post them here, so that people in
the future might not have to go through the hassle that I did. I also
forwarded this to Olympus in hopes that they might add it to their
knowledge base.

---------

The problem that I encountered with my new Olympus DS-2200 Voice
Recorder on Mac OS X 10.3.7 is as follows:

After installing the software that comes on the CDROM and then plugging
my voice recorder into the USB port on my 17" Apple Powerbook, I got an
error, which said, "System extension cannot be used. The system
extension /System/Library/Extensions/OlympusDSSDriver.kext was
installed improperly and cannot be user. Please try reinstalling it, or
contact the product's vendor for an update."

I first checked online for any software updates (Apple or Olympus).
There was one minor Olympus update, so I downloaded and installed it.
But the error still kept occurring, even after system reboots. I called
Olympus and they were beyond unhelpful. They asked me if I had the most
recent version of the software from the website and after that said
that they couldn't help anymore because the DS-2200 is a professional
model and it is only supported by the vendor that sold the product. It
is amazing to me they can stay in business when they snub their
"professional" clients so thoroughly. So anyways, I called the vendor I
purchased the recorder from and they honestly sounded a bit surprised
by Olympus's response to me, but then contacted their distributor to
help me out. While I was waiting for them to get ahold of the
distributor's support personell and call me back, I actually figured
out what the problem was, since I happen to make my living as a
computer professional.

Basically, to troubleshoot it I looked online and found out what
command a user can run to load a kernel extension, so that maybe I
could see the real error that was being generated. I discovered it, and
then started by open up a Terminal window.

At the Terminal window I typed:

sudo kextload -t /System/Library/Extensions/OlympusDSSDriver.kext

This command asked me for my admin password and then produced an error
that basically said:

------
kernel extension OlympusDSSDriver.kext/ has problems:
Authentication failures
{
"File owner/permissions are incorrect" = (
"/System/Library/Extensions/OlympusDSSDriver.kext"
)
}
...stuff ommited...


So I looked at the permissions by typing:

sudo ls -lFa /System/Library/Extensions

and below is some of the resulting output:

...stuff omitted...
drwxr-xr-x 4 root staff 136 21 Jan 13:03 OlympusDSSDriver.kext/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 27 Oct 17:41 PPP.kext/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 27 Sep 2003 PPPSerial.ppp/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 27 Sep 2003 PPPoE.ppp/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 27 Sep 2003 PPTP.ppp/
...stuff omiited....

I noticed that the permission on the OlympusDSSDriver.kext were
root:staff and on all the other files it was root:wheel. This seemed to
sync with the error reported when I tried to load the kernel extension
so I decided to try and change the permissions for
OlympusDSSDriver.kext. Now, Apple's Disk Utility program that comes
with all OS X machines has a repair permissions button, but I tried to
use this, and it did not fix this problem. I have reported this issue
to Apple, so that hopefully they can fix this issue with Disk Utility.
Since I couldn't do it with their tool I went back to the Terminal
window and typed:

sudo chown -R root:wheel
/System/Library/Extensions/OlympusDSSDriver.kext

This worked fine and if I then typed:

sudo kextload -t /System/Library/Extensions/OlympusDSSDriver.kext

I got the following response:

----
kextload: extension OlympusDSSDriver.kext/ appears to be valid
kextload: OlympusDSSDriver.kext/ loaded successfully
----

And after rebooting, plugging in the voice recorder via USB and
starting the DSS Player worked fine, exactly like expected.

It would be really nice, since I've taken the time to type this up, if
Olympus would add this to their knowledge base, so that in the future
if people call with this or a similar issue they can actually help
instead of simply avoiding supporting their "professional" clients who
just spent a small fortune on their equipment.

I hope that this will also be of use to others who experience any
similar issues.


Thanks a lot,
Sean

That is a totally awesome diagnosis and fix! Thanks for the writeup! I'm
in the process of installing Panther (10.3.x) and I'm sure I'll find
this thread useful when installing my external hardware. Thanks again!

CD