[geeks] Leopard du, was: find - having a senior moment

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Mon, 14 Jan 2008, Nadine Miller wrote:

> Btw, how are folks liking the new Leopard?

I've reverted my laptop back to 10.4 because I was getting about 30% of
the battery time I was used to and, when my USB aircard was plugged in,
the kernel on it bombed so frequently that I couldn't even fill out a
bug report between crashes:

   http://jonathan.celestrion.net/stuff/leopard-futility.jpg

For what it's worth, I can duplicate that behavior on a Mac Pro with the
same USB aircard (which works fine under 10.4).  So it's not bad memory
or something like that.  I also tried a fresh reinstall on the laptop to
see if my problems were due to upgrading, and that didn't make things
any better.

X11 is broken.  I've had to load a 3rd-party build of Xquartz to get
multi-monitor support working.  That doesn't fix the rest of my problems
with it, though:  X11 will occasionally lose focus for less than a
second and blink back, which introduces interesting typographical errors
in my work; modifier keys that are held down during a loss-of-focus
event become "stuck" until they are pressed again (makes for
extra-special fun in vi).

Upgrading from 10.4 left me with a completely trashed smb setup (windows
clients couldn't mount shares, and leopard kept deleting them every
reboot) until I moved smb.conf out of the way and copied the one from
the DVD.  For added fun, after I got SMB working, I started getting
strange messages from Windows clients (both real and under VMware) about
data being lost.  I've followed the MS knowledgebase's recommendations
for making it go away, but it seems to be persistently (and repeatably)
a server-side problem.

Printing was broken (couldn't print or manage printers unless I was
logged in with administrative privileges) until I nuked -all- the CUPS
configuration and started over.

VMware Fusion's updates to make it compatible with Leopard now means
that high load in the guests can either crash OS X or make it unusable
(something gets wedged in the file cache, and the only way to recover is
to run sync in one shell, and reboot -qn in the another).  Office 2004
has a few minor, but annoying, visual quirks.  Photoshop CS2 and
Illustrator CS2 have random crashes (known issues with 10.5).

The new Terminal.app is nicer-looking, but has a strange behavior where
it will resize my terminals for no reason at all, if they're nearly as
tall as the screen.  There's no warning for it.  It just sneaks up
behind me and shrinks my active terminal by 4 or 5 lines.

And, for the longest, I couldn't even burn a CD on the damned thing
because changes to DiscBurning's API broke Burn and Toast.

The much-touted backup mechanism for OSX is great if you don't use
virtual machines or RDBMS software or anything else that creates very
large files that change often.  There doesn't seem to be a useful way to
inform Time Machine of that, so it's back to cron and rsnapshot for me.

After fighting it for about two months, I have it nearly as usable as
10.4 was, except I have an ugly[0] menubar and an iCal icon that updates
with the current date when it isn't open.  Whee.

So, outside of trading stability in almost every single app I use all
day long (VMware, server-side SMB, CS2, X11) for some irritating eye
candy, I guess it's a tolerable upgrade.  That is to say, I wish I'd
have archived my system first so I would undo it.

A colleague of mine has a problem that Leopard popped up a dialogue box
asking him to confirm traffic sent from mDNSResponder and configd.  He
picked the wrong answer and now can only hold onto a DHCP lease if he's
turned the firewall off.

Beta quality code at best.


[0] Yes, I'm aware of the fix for that.  The result still isn't as
     handsome as how 10.4 and earlier shipped.  Oh well, that's up for
     debate, I suppose.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Elgin, TX
USA