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

[Mark]

On 14 Jan 2008, at 22:59, 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

It's a USB stack bug in the new Kernel/module I think, I've had a few  
bomb-outs swapping USB devices, and it's only started since 10.5. It's  
not frequent enough to annoy me though. TBH USB LAN interfaces have  
always struck me as a suspect idea anyway, but maybe that's just me :P

> For what it's worth, I can duplicate that behavior on a Mac Pro

Yup, same OS, same USB stack bug :).

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

> X11 is broken.

I think you are a masochist using X11 on OS X full-stop. I tried once  
but I didn't inhale.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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 just played with it and it seems to have MPD when it comes to  
following the 'respect the dock' rules. IT does, then it doesn't, then  
if you use Spaces or move the window it shrinks back so it does.  
Something is screwed in there somewhere.

> 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...

> 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.

> except I have an ugly[0] menubar

Get thee to Leopaque and turn off that sinful translucency.

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

They added that by request from a *shit ton* of users who got sick of  
it saying 'July 17th' all the time when it wasn't running.

> 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 clean install might fix some gripes (if you didn't do one before).  
CS2 is ancient history as it's PPC only and so it's not really  
anything Adobe are ever likely to care about. I think I already made  
my thoughts on X11 clear ;)

> 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.

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...

> [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.

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

-- 
Mark Benson

My Blog:
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"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."