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

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Jan 14, 2008, at 5:59 PM, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> 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

Strange, I can use one just fine.

However, one problem I've had with MacOS USB with both Tiger and  
Leopard is USB video.

I got a Pinnacle HD Stick, and after 12-48 hours, it will crash MacOS  
hard.

Apple blames everyone else for this, but it is quite clear in the  
kernel panic that the problem is in the USB IOKit driver.

The Leopard issue I've had is that my USB hard drive starts up a  
12Mbit/sec when the machine powers on.  I have to boot up, and then  
unplug the drive and plug it back in, and then I get 480Mbit/sec USB  
2.0 speeds.

This is unique to Leopard, Tiger is fine.

My drive is a Seagate FreeAgent drive.  I think though, the drive  
brand doesn't matter, because at least some Maxtor and WD owners  
report the same thing.

> 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.

It sounds like the OS, but remember that bad hardware can run in one  
OS and not another due to faults in the hardware.

I know a lot people who have had constant problems with Aircards on a  
lot of different Mac systems and OS releases.

Leopard did break some USB things, but I think MacOS has an overall  
problem in its USB code that has existed for some time.

In fact... I really wonder if there is *ANY* OS that has truly good  
USB code.

It seems an impossible task, probably due in large part to the fact  
that USB and its supporting hardware kinda sucks.

> X11 is broken.  I've had to load a 3rd-party build of Xquartz to get
> multi-monitor support working.

Hmmm... X works fine for me, but I just now got 2 monitors hooked up  
and have not tried it since I put the second one online.

I was hoping this would "just work".

> 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.

I have had the exact opposite experience.  For me, Tiger never did  
remote sharing correctly at all.

Leopard usually "just works".  It is far better than Tiger.

I guess our mileage varied here.

> 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.

Ditto, printing works better for me.

> 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).

I use Fusion almost 24/7 and have not seen any of this, and I usually  
have at least 2 VMs running all the time.

> Office 2004
> has a few minor, but annoying, visual quirks.  Photoshop CS2 and
> Illustrator CS2 have random crashes (known issues with 10.5).

Office 2004 sucks, and has annoying quirks on every platform, so I  
would have a hard time knowing what this means... :)

I did notice this though: in iPhoto, the scrollbar arrows are messed  
up.  There is a gap in the UI widget for the scrollbar at the top and  
the bottom, and it only happens in iPhoto.  Weird, and hard to explain  
without a picture.

> 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.

I use iTerm myself.  Terminal has improved, but iTerm has better  
keyboard shortcuts.

Both of them suck in terms of being very slow when resizing the  
windows, which I can't figure out.  You'd think that would be fast on  
a Mac.

> 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.

I use both programs under Leopard with no issues.

> 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.

This is trivial to fix in the Time Machine configuration.

Just exclude anything like that.

Time Machine is not appropriate for data like that anyway.

Time Machine is not new code.  It's an ancient UNIX trick that works  
really great, but has never been good for large files that change a lot.

Time Machine, rsync, rsnapshot... all such programs have always sucked  
at large file changes, and can interfere with some database operations.

On the latter though, it is usually because the DB is faulty.  A  
properly written one will not be affected.

> After fighting it for about two months, I have it nearly as usable as
> 10.4 was, except I have an ugly[0] menubar

I would love to have the blue Apple logo back.  I hate the black one.

I am indifferent to the transparent effect, and it is easy to turn off.

> and an iCal icon that updates
> with the current date when it isn't open.  Whee.

I don't get that.

In fact, I had to find a program to add that feature to Leopard,  
because I like it.

> 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.

Amazing how different things can be for people.

I find Leopard more reliable than Tiger, a lot faster, and I've had  
almost no problems with 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.

Instead of turning the firewall off, why not go to Preferences and  
remove the accidentally created rule?

This is no different than if you mistakenly hand-edit a rule in  
OpenBSD or any other OS with a firewall.


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