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

[Nadine Miller]

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.

> 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.

>> 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.
> 
> Tip no 25.7 subsection B. Don't hack about with the text files. OS X  
> overrides a lot of them. it only uses them as fallback incase it can't  
> fond it's own config.

Definitely.  However, here are other issues relative to upgrading that 
affects files across the whole system.

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

>> 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.
> 
> Did you upgrade from 10.4 or do a clean install? I **really** don't  
> recommend running upgrades between major versions of any OS. It's  
> especially bad kitty-litter on OS X though - there are so many  
> difference between major iterations that stuff ALWAYS screws up. I  
> don't care what the nice dude called John in the Apple video said,  
> upgrades are broken and always have been. Upgrading from 10.4 bricked  
> a good few machines completely.

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. 
501/501, and user creation made your new group equal to your username. 
Now, the first user, who by default has admin privs is 501/staff (group 
33, iirc).  For users who have custom *NIX environments, this breaks 
stuff--particularly if you do an upgrade, rather than clean install + 
migration.  I had further difficulties, even though I did the latter, as 
my UID/GID is 502/502 due to running NFS at home.  Further, it's not 
really obvious how to change your default group, or even, to create a 
new group.  There's a number of threads on the Apple board about it.

It's incredibly stupid that the upgrade doesn't check for this.

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. 
I had a weird thing happen on the last patch round on my other box 
running Tiger.  Basically something got borked, and video which played 
fine prior to the patches started stuttering badly with dropped frames. 
  I ended up booting into single user mode after a fix perms, and 
installing the whole 10.4 combo bundle to fix it.

In retrospect it seems like a no brainer, but it is a good thing <tm> 
that 10.5 goes to single user mode to install certain types of patches.

>> 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.
> 
> Man, I've not used Toast since 10.3...

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

>> 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.
> 
> In the preferences you can 'Exclude' folders and files. That means  
> they won't get backed up but at least it saves on the Time Machine  
> agro. I think Time Machine needs a lot adding to it, it's great that  
> it just works from a mom & pop POV but for serious users it's   bit  
> limited.

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.

> One of my biggest gripes is they ditched a PERFECTLY GOOD SPI FIREWALL  
> and replaced it with some retarded application Firewall crap that ends  
> up not actually working and is so reminiscent of Vista it makes my  
> teeth hurt. I turned it off and used Little Snitch to manage my  
> applications connections instead in order to retain my sanity. I  
> wasn't pissed off about it, honest...

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).  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).

> I prefer a flat graded bar, it is easier on the eye IMHO, at least now  
> I got rid of the retarded translucent effect.

I don't look at it enough to worry about it.

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.

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.

=Nadine=