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

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Jan 16, 2008, at 12:46 PM, Nadine Miller wrote:

> Mark wrote:
>
>
>> My Powerbook G4 sometimes will boot up, sit on the desktop, then
>> Kernel Panic spontaneously for no good reason. Reboot and it's
>> absolutely fine. I can't complain about that though as it's no
>> supported officially by 10.5 :P
>
> I've had no problems with mine.  The "unsupported" business is just a
> speed check in the installer, nothing more--I can only presume it's
> concern for the "experience" and getting people to buy new
> hardware...like any OS upgrade apparently.

...which is odd, because I know a couple of people with older machines  
and they find Leopard runs faster, sometimes quite a bit.

IOt's probably the latter: drive new sales.

>> I think you are a masochist using X11 on OS X full-stop. I tried once
>> but I didn't inhale.
>
> I have to agree, though I can see the need for it in certain *NIX
> situations.

X is still the world standard for remote graphics, so they do need to  
keep it running correctly.

I need to test the dual monitor thing before I end up needing it... :)

> My SMB setup and my NFS setup is a lot more stable under Leopard.

Same here.  Night and day difference.

I usually could not get SMB working on my LAN with Tiger.

> One of the only issues I had was that of UID/GID change.  In 10.3 and
> 10.4, your UID matched your GID, like a typical *NIX setup--i.e.

This one they really should have done better.  As you said, the  
installer should have checked for this and fixed it silently.  A  
little documentation would be nice as well.

My upgrade went perfectly, but I did have to fix permissions and file  
ownership.

It's doable, but not for the average user.

> One of the big things *everyone* says is that regardless of whether  
> you
> are patching or upgrading, *always* do a fix perms before *and* after.

For me, doing it after has been good enough, but you are probably  
right because if your permissions are wrong before the upgrade, it  
could certainly screw it up.

> I haven't tried to burn anything with Toast yet, so I will watch out  
> for
> that.

Burn works fine on Leopard.

> It's relatively painless, though I wish there was some way to change  
> the
> frequency.  Hourly is too much for me, and with my CPU being  
> borderline
> for the load on my machine, I just disconnect my backup drive rather
> than deal with it.

I'm kind of surprised about this, but I think you might be able to  
change this from the command line, not sure.

It's a strange omission, especially for people who might only be able  
to back up during certain times.

> Agreed.  I've installed Waterroof that gives a gui config interface to
> the still running ipfw, which is now just set to accept all  
> connections
> (rolls eyes).

I've thought of getting that.  I was pretty disappointed that they  
made this firewall change.

The main thing is the firewall preferences are now severely dumbed down.

You can choose between three "modes" basically.

If you go to advanced, instead of being able to set individual rules,  
you are put into an application type configuration.

Odd decision.

> The app firewall would be more useful if it allowed you
> to restrict *outbound* connections as well (admittedly that would kill
> the need for Little Snitch, but it's not like that every stopped an OS
> manufacturer before).

The problem with app firewalls is they depend on the user knowing for  
certain what the app in question is.

Little Snitch does a good job of showing you which exec is being  
affected, which is better than things like Zone Alarm on Windows, but  
there is still the possibility that one of those apps is an imposter.

Granted, even with a standard firewall, you still have a problem, but  
I think app firewalls are misleading, and their documentation should  
at least note this.


> I have to say that I do like some of the new features of Safari.  If
> ad-blocking was built-in, I'd probably use it 100%.  As it stands, I'm
> now about 50/50 Safari/Camino.

Safari is still a massive memory hog.

More than any other feature, I want browsers to fix that problem.

They are *ALL* horribly out of control in the memory usage department.


> The only app I've really had any issues with thus far is TextMate.   
> It's
> crashed a couple of times--it appears to get hung up on network mounts
> from what I can tell.  I should slap some dtrace on it to debug  
> further,
> but he puts out updates at a reasonable clip, so I haven't bothered.

The one I miss is Super Duper.  They are really taking a long time to  
issue  Leopard fix.


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