[geeks] More Fun with Leopard

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Feb 13, 2008, at 6:09 PM, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> 10.5.2 fixed almost all of my X11 complaints.

I still haven't had time to get X11 up and running.  Good to hear  
though.

I like most of what 10.5.2 did.

However, there are still issues, some really stupid, and Apple is  
notorious for not telling you what changed unless it was mostly  
superficial.

They rarely tell you what really matters.

> But the update has completely horked VMware worse than even before
> VMware worked around the kernel bug in 10.5.1.  In the bad old days of
> 10.5.0 and 10.5.1 running VMware 1.1, high network or CPU  
> utilization in
> the VM could lock the kernel for I/O.

This was the buffered-read kernel problem.  VMware just happened to  
trigger it more than other apps.

Having said that, VMware is not the best written software in the  
world.  I have actually found VMware more stable on Mac than it ever  
has been on Linux.

It's a real mess on Linux, though some of that is the fault of Linux  
and its politics.

> But now VMware freezes.  It grabs the mouse pointer and locks - 
> hard-.  I
> can Cmd-tab to another application, and I have full use of the  
> keyboard

Interesting.

I live in VMware every day, and I'm not having any issues with 10.5.2.

In fact, I'm pretty sure Apple made quite a few changes under the hood  
because VMware and other memory hogs use a lot less memory now so the  
system is generally faster.

Of course, it could just be that I've not seen it yet, but I've been  
doing world builds on FreeBSD in VMware, which is a decent load.

> I think tomorrow might be the day I bite the bullet and buy a large
> enough external disk to back up this Mac and roll back to 10.4.11.   
> I've
> had two such freezes already today, one of which left me with  
> needing to
> restore my VM from a ghost image.

I am kind of stuck between the two.

Leopard is a *LOT* faster than Tiger, at least it has been for me, and  
there are other changes which I really like.

However, there were also steps backward that make me want Tiger.

For the most part, I lean toward Leopard and I really can't go back.   
For one thing, I have some Leopard-only software.

Leopard was a lot bigger update than most people realize.  It was a  
far deeper change than Windows Vista, for example.

> I have a growing pile of Win32 code I absolutely -have- to churn out
> today, and Apple's extended beta-test program that they seem to call a
> production release isn't helping me shrink it.

Leopard was a little rough, but you seem to have a lot more problems  
than I do, and we are running the same things.

I've seen that a lot with Leopard: some people view it as a little  
rough, while others find show stoppers.



-- 
"Where some they sell their dreams for small desires."