Review: Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar

I am a bitter old man. I hate change. Mac OS -- not Mac OS X, which is a different OS -- in its various iterations has been my OS of choice for over 15 years, and I have not looked fondly on the day that streak ends. But that day may very well be at hand. I like Mac OS X v10.2 enough that it may soon become my primary OS. From the day Apple acquired NeXT, and Rhapsody was announced, I was excited about the prospect of a "modern operating system" (read: Unix) that would look and act like my beloved Mac OS. But as Mac OS X started to become a reality, it became clear that this was not going to be Mac OS. It was going to be MacNeXT.

Oh, it wasn't entirely un-Mac-like. But it was different enough that I wasn't comfortable in it. I love Mac OS because of its ease of use and applications and interface and all of the little things. I sit in front of this darned computer for most of my waking hours, and if I am not comfortable with it, then it's no good. Life is too short.

Mac OS X v10.0 was a disappointment to me, and many loyalists to Mac OS. Many things in the interface just didn't work at all, or as well as, they did in Mac OS. Many still don't work right, including cmd+arrow keys to open and close arrows in Finder windows (half works: cmd+opt+arrow should open or close all hierarchical folders) and in dialogs with progress bars, such as file copying (doesn't work). The file dialogs, stuck in a column view, are, in my opinion, a glaring design flaw. In many places in the OS, you can't merely hit "return" in an active dialog to select the default button (if there is a default button at all), or "escape" to cancel.

But these problems were just the beginning. In 10.0, performance was bad, even on G4s. This improved significantly in 10.1, but Mac OS v9.2 still seemed faster. The entire Mac OS X UI -- while eminently "lickable," like no OS before it -- was tiring to look at. Anti-aliasing made things harder to read, especially on LCDs, even with the unnaturally large fonts in the Finder; many of the UI elements, including the aqua ones, often distracted the eye.

But in 10.2 (Jaguar), much has changed. The aqua elements are sharper, crisper ... perhaps shinier. Many of the UI elements, such as the Dock, are more subdued. The Finder has more options for changing the appearance of elements such as font size. Gosh, complaining about font size sounds petty, but darnit, it is so much nicer to look at.

The cursors are improved: the busy cursor has gone from an ugly rainbow pinwheel to a cute rainbow pinwheel (and how long before Steve makes it monochrome?). The arrow cursor has a better outline around it. The I-bar cursor still needs work; I lose it on dark backgrounds. In Mac OS, that cursor would change from dark to light when it passed over something dark.

Similarly, I also now lose my selection box in the Finder; in previous versions of Mac OS X, a selection box in a white space would appear grey. Now it is white, and invisible. Oops.

But while in the Finder, one of my old favorites is finally back: multiple Get Info windows. If you select multiple items at once, you still get the single window with all the items, but you can at least now open many Get Info items for individual items, one at a time. And you can get the old behavior of a single floating window ("Inspector") by holding down Option.

I still can't copy the content of a text clipping in the Finder. That's just insane. Open the clipping. Read it. Cmd-c to copy the contents to the Clipboard. This is a no-brainer.

It's all of these little touches that make a significant difference in whether I can comfortably use the OS on a daily basis. And for the first time ever, despite the problems that still exist, I am mostly comfortable.

And man, is Jaguar fast. Everything is just more responsive. Previously, clicking on UI elements would begin a delay that isn't there anymore. It's noticeably quicker. Even Classic seems quicker, despite the fact that Mac OS is no longer included with Mac OS X.

But I still can't do everything in Mac OS X, even with Classic. My UMAX (*spit*) scanner won't work, and likely never will; I use it seldom enough that it's probably a better use of my time and money to boot into Mac OS to use it, for now. I am having trouble getting reliable fax software to work, so I booted into Mac OS to use FaxSTF last weekend (I was going to install the 10.0 installer I have and then the Jaguar update when it comes out, but 10.0 won't install at all on Jaguar, so I am probably out of luck with that, though I am keeping my eye on Cocoa eFax, too).

But most important to my comfort is that all of the apps I know and love from Mac OS -- BBEdit, Interarchy, DragThing, Mozilla, Eudora -- work natively in Mac OS X. The operating system exists to host applications. They are the reason I use the computer. I want the same apps, and, thankfully, I have them. Further, much of Mac OS is still there, like QuickTime, AirPort, Keychains, AppleScript, and Internet Config (although this works somewhat oddly in some cases, and there's not much of a UI for it).

But the big question is: why should I use Mac OS X? If I am just trying to recreate Mac OS, why not just stick with Mac OS?

There are two answers. The first is a single word: Unix. I don't need to describe in detail why Unix is a Good Thing to Slashdot readers, but I will say that XDarwin and fink are two of the most important features of Mac OS X, and having a stable operating system is a joy. The stability of Mac OS certainly was pretty good -- ignore the hypocrites who used to praise Mac OS but now decry it -- but it can't match Mac OS X. That I can put my laptop to sleep, and wake immediately, and still have many TCP/IP connections open, is incredible to me.

The second answer is that new features are added to Mac OS X to make it too compelling to ignore.

The i* software suite -- iChat, iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iCal, iSync, iProbablyForgotSomething -- are in many cases some of the best products to hit personal computing in many years. iMovie and iDVD are leaders in their niches. iTunes was a bit flat in its earlier versions, but gets more compelling in its feature set every year. iChat is actually a nice chat client: unobtrusive, mostly well-integrated into the system and Address Book, and easy on the eyes (it's also a little buggy; expect a few crashes). iPhoto is a nice beginning, but really needs better features for more flexible exporting of image metadata to be well-used. iCal and iSync aren't yet released, but by all accounts look very promising: how long before I ditch my PDA, or at least Palm Desktop's contacts and calendar apps?

Then there's Rendezvous -- the "zero configuration" networking -- which is only beginning to get significant use, but is sure to be a staple of many applications for years to come. Despite having some problems with printer sharing (making a comeback, finally) via Rendezvous -- I mistakenly had some computers on my network with a 255.0.0.0 subnet mask while others were 255.255.255.0, and this was enough to throw it off -- it requires zero configuration once you're configured properly.

Sherlock is now finally its own separate beast, with Find integrated into the Finder (imagine that!) and no longer is it scraping web pages, but it is enabled with web services goodness.

All of these features and more are only available in Mac OS X. If you want them, you need to switch.

Still, some things simply don't work in Mac OS X v10.2. The upgrade went smoothly, but various third-party apps, and even some Apple programs, had trouble. My chosen replacements for the Dock -- DragThing and LiteSwitch X -- both needed updates (Proteron says LiteSwitchX update should be available any day now). WeatherPop needed updating. WirelessDriver -- a serious boon to PowerBook G4 users who need to work more than 20 feet from a wireless base station -- no longer works, and it's not been updated in many months.

Apple Remote Desktop 1.0.x doesn't work; you'll need to run Software Update to get version 1.1. Unfortunately, even the new version only half-worked for me; the client side seems fine, but the Admin app says it is not installed properly. I wanted to just uninstall the whole thing and start over, but there is no uninstall option, that I could find. So I deleted all the files that the Installer installs, and then tried to reinstall, and the Installer says it is already installed. So now I have nothing, and I can't change it.

I thought for awhile that Apple's ScriptMenu didn't work, too; it was still sitting in /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/ where I had left it, but it was not launching. I searched for ScriptMenu on the discs and hard drive for information or a replacement, and on Apple's site, but found nothing. I was later informed the name had been changed from "ScriptMenu" to "Script Menu": the replacement was in the /Applications/AppleScript/ directory. Oops.

fink has a few problems, as one might expect with an OS update that sees a move from gcc2.9 to gcc3.1. Most of the things I tried worked fine without recompiling, including XFree86. But xterm and bash broke because of dependencies relating to the change gcc3.1, and manconf (a wrapper for Mac OS X's man) broke, because the Jaguar man doesn't accept the -C option to specify a configuration file. The workaround is to install fink's man, or at least remove /sw/bin/man in the meantime. The fink team is working to resolve the issues, and updates are forthcoming. An update for xterm is available on the XonX page.

SSHAgentServices, which sets an ssh-agent for the entire login session, stopped working; but the author of SSHPassKey, which I use to provide the ssh password to GUI apps, said he would integrate ssh-agent services into the next version of his application. Some of TinkerTool was obsoleted by 10.2, as Apple has added some of those preferences into their UIs, things like Terminal transparency, and what to do with newly mounted CDs and DVDs, so there's a new version available.

Currently, SharePoints doesn't work. This configures NetInfo to allow you to share arbitrary folders with any users via file sharing. So now I don't have a reasonable file server, unless I want to give everyone admin access to see all the volumes on the machine. But the author says he has discovered the problem, and a new version is forthcoming. This makes me quite happy.

There's also the long-standing and unresolved problem of AvantGo not working with Mac OS X. It's amazing that this is still broken.

I'm not making any firm commitments, but I am using Mac OS X as my primary OS right now, and it's the least painful it's ever been. That's more of a compliment than it seems. But there's enough that doesn't work, enough that's raw -- especially with third-party software -- that I'd recommend people who don't like pain to wait at least a few weeks, if not a month or so, to allow all of the issues to be worked out, tech notes to be published, and workarounds to be posted.

Comments

This upgrade saved me $500

[Microsift]

I was seriously considering buying Office v.x so that I wouldn't have to switch to classic everytime I wanted to run Excel. Switching to Classic is far less painful now(Launching classic and Excel took 40 seconds). Granted this is not super speedy, but it is a significant improvement.

Re:This upgrade saved me $500

[randomErr]

Save yourself a few more buck and use OpenOffice on OSX.

Re:This upgrade saved me $500

[clifyt]

Am I the only one that has used Open Office and thinks it sucks and is WAY to slow? My main writting machine is an iBook 600 which should be fast enough to use any word processor without worrying about typing latency. Yeah, Linux and Slow Connections have honed my skill of not looking at the screen or the keys and focusing on other things, but when its local, its annoying.

I thought the idea of linux was Software That Doesn't Suck...at least once you remove the religious zealots from the mix. M$ Office is the one package from Microsoft that I would gladly recommend folks have. Open Office is a pale comparison to that...yeah, you can get things done but not as easily.

clif

Faxing solution

[MouseR]

Try PageSender available from Smile Software.

It provides printer-like setup and fax capabilities. Exactly what e've all been waiting for. it's a shareware, and makes use of OpenSource code like eFax.

It supports faxing my modem and web-based fax services.

THIS is the faxing solution that should have come bundled in the OS.

Networking

[I_am_Rambi]

it requires zero configuration once you're configured properly.

I work at my university setting up studetn owned computers. I have set up a few Macs, even a 10.2 TiBook the other day. Networking is pretty easy. Select what device (Airport, ethernet) and tell it dhcp. No restarting. Web will then work. The only problem that I have ran acrossed is working with proxies. We have three proxies on campus, and IE 5.x does not like to work with the proxies to go outside of the intranet.

I have found away around this problem. I have to tell the system what proxy to use, and then hard code the sign in proccess screen, as the homepage using the same proxy. When IE starts up, the user is then given the choice to sign in (or if he is sign in to go the internet, it will say). Since IE doesn't like to use connection scripts, this is the only solution I have found.

This small problem is not bad, just wish M$ would fix IE to run connection scripts.

Re:Networking

[hype7]

Yeah, Linux and windows 2000/XP does the same thing.

2000 requires a reboot if you change the network stack in my experience

-- james

My thoughts

[Phroggy]

Aqua has indeed improved. Buttons, in particular, are more... subdued? It looks like they're trying to make things more functional and less flashy.

The arrow pointer looked weird at first, particularly when over a white background, but I've gotten used to it, and it doesn't bug me anymore. Over a darker background it's perfect.

I also have a UMAX scanner, and it may never be supported natively. I did find VueScan which also works on Linux, but I'm not really thrilled with the UI - guess I'll have to play with it some more.

I never really used Sherlock for anything besides searching for files. Thank god they've put that functionality back where it's supposed to be. I may use Sherlock now, but I'm not forced to launch it if all I want is a quick search for a file.

I recently discovered LiteSwitch X, and I miss it. You'd think Apple could make a decent task switcher. Under OS9 I was using the Microsoft Office Manager, which was just about perfect.

"The least painful it's ever been" sums it up quite nicely. It's only getting better, and eventually won't be painful at all. That hope keeps me going. :-)

Why use OSX? First, the OS doesn't crash as often. Second, it's UNIX. I love being able to ssh to my Linux box from work, send a WOL packet to my Mac to wake it from sleep, ssh into it, locate a file, and use scp to send it where I need it.

Now if I can just get ghostscript to work, I'll be able to print from Linux to the printer on my Mac. I'm really impressed with cups.

You might want to try VueScan for your scans

[teamhasnoi]

This allows me to use my UMAX scanner from OS X. It's updated all the time, and works relly well. YMMV.

What I find ironic, is that my mom is using the most advanced unix ever at home, while I'm still futzing with Windows. I knew there was a reason I go to work.

I ran into the same problem with SharePoints and eventually had to move the entire pile of folders to my public folder to share. BAH!

And I'm still trying to get a VNC server that works on OS X, then I could pretend that I have OS X 10.1 at home.

See, I'd pretend 10.1, cause the connection would be slow.. :P

Re:You might want to try VueScan for your scans

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK the only Aqua-displaying VNC server is osxvnc. The official hompage is down (osxvnc.com), however, there's a posting here with a download link. Used it once, worked just fine....

Also

[OrangeHairMan]

There are a lot (300+) user comments/reviews on MacSlash: http://www.macslash.org/articles/02/08/24/0410244. shtml

Orange

Re:iMicrosoft?

[BeeShoo]

"I know I'm going to get flamed to pieces for this, but isn't the i* software suite just doing what Microsoft did with Windows and Internet Explorer?"

Nope. There's big difference between included with the OS" and "part of the OS".
Having said that, I don't believe for a second that IE is truly part of the OS. But, you don't get a choice whether or not to install it (the iApps do not have to be installed), and there is no way (at least, none provided by MS) to uninstall IE. The iApps can all be removed simply by using the delete key. No harm to your system. Install your preferred app, get on with your life.
BIG difference.

I, Too, am Impressed...

[superdan2k]

So I waited in line at the Mall of America to get Jaguar on Friday night (the whole tirade about that is in a recent posting in my livejournal). Prior to this, I upgraded my 500MHz dual-USB iBook from 256MB of RAM to 640MB. It seemed a bit snappier, and things definitely went more smoothly while running with tons o' apps.

Enter Jaguar. Faster, snappier, crisper. This was worth the wait and worth the money. The integration between the basic iApps (iChat, Mail and Address book) is <cartman>sweeeeeet</cartman>. None of my major apps required updating. I haven't spent that much of a weekend futzing around with an OS (and enjoying it) since 10.1 came out.

Minor tidbits: the firewall GUI is nice. PHP is now part of the standard install (however you may want to visit Mark Liyange's page to see how to re-enable a lot of the functionality that Apple dumbed-down. (This page also has package installers for MySQL, Ruby, and tons of other cool stuff.) The Mail app seems to be pretty adept at identifying spam...and getting better and better over the last couple of days...and the bounce-to-sender feature makes it look like you don't exist anymore...it's not perfect but it seems to have reduced the incoming flow by about 10-15%. iChat, a little buggy, but nice...I thought I was going to hate the voice-balloon interface, but I discovered that, strangely enough, it's easier on the eyes than multiple lines of text.

All in all, I'd say that they've outdone themselves again.

Re:I, Too, am Impressed...

[bpbond]

Also in the minor tidbit department: lots of people bitched about the command-tab in 10.1.x would shift between running apps linearly (i.e., order in the Dock) as opposed to a stack (i.e., in order of last use). This has changed in Jaguar, and makes app switching MUCH better.

Speed and new features

[shaper]

10.2 is much faster than 10.1 on my DP533. So far, almost every program launch that I have seen takes 1 Dock bounce. I think I saw 2 bounces once, but I don't remember now which app it might have been. Everything just zaps across the screen, even with my puny GeForce2 MX.

Love the new Get Info, especially the integrated ownership/permission view and change options. Love the file find integrated into the Finder and it's fast, too.

One feature I haven't heard mentioned much, is the better user account management. I have 3 kids and now I can set up their accounts restricted to do only the things I give them access to, and they can't wander around the filesystem accidently trashing stuff that I forgot to restrict the file permissions on. Really nice.

New Internet sharing and built-in firewall "just work". I'm planning on buying a new phone just to get the new contact and calendar sync features with iSync and iCal. It will be great having Apple write the sync software, not having to wait forever for Palm or Microsoft to remember Mac users.

I was an early adopter of Mac OS X 10.0, mainly for Unix features and stability. Now Mac OS X 10.2 rocks in a lot of other ways.

Re:Nice Review

[foobar104]

Yeah. And it also makes it pretty clear that Pudge doesn't understand Rendezvous. And the whole "printer sharing with Rendezvous" thing sounds fishy to me. Methinks he's actually talking about AppleTalk, not Rendezvous.

In the interest of clearing things up for the layman-- web resources on Rendezvous and ZeroConf are pretty obtuse-- here's the briefest possible explanation. I don't guarantee it's 100% right, but I think it's pretty close.

Rendezvous comes in two parts: hostname-to-IP mapping and service advertisement and discovery. With Rendezvous, you can make two machine talk to each other by name without host tables or DNS servers. When I'm on one machine-- felix-- I can address the other machine-- oscar-- by name by using the FQDN "oscar.local." For example, I type "FTP oscar.local." All the Rendezvous-equipped machines on my LAN are listening to a special link-local multicast address for DNS-style queries. When oscar receives my machine's query asking about "oscar.local," it replies with its IP address. This works for any combination of IP addresses, but it works best with self-assigned ones. You know, the 169.254 addresses your computer comes up with when no DHCP server responds. This works perfectly now between two Macs with Jaguar. I've been using it every day for months, on developer program pre-release builds. There were some problems with mDNSResponder running amuck, but that has apparently gone away in built 6C125, which is what I'm running now.

The other part of Rendezvous is service advertisement and discovery. That's not implemented in very many apps yet, but one that has it is iChat. When iChat starts up (if Rendezvous chat is enabled) it sends out a query looking for all machines on the local net that support the service "so-n-so." (I don't remember what the iChat service is called.) All the iChatty machines out there respond, and among themselves they set up a sort of ad hoc peer-to-peer network where one machine can message any other machine directly.

iTunes will have this functionality someday, but it doesn't yet. We've all seen the demo where Steve browsed Phil's library over the network. That was a concept demo, not a real feature demo. That's not finished yet.

So Rendezvous is confusing at first.

Partially this is Apple's fault, but in all fairness, how would you market multicast DNS as an operating system feature? It's fucking cool, so you want people to know about it, but exactly how would you describe it?

The end result? Everybody's excited about Rendezvous, but hardly anybody gets it.

Wireless PCMCIA drivers coming soon.

[colaboy]

Regarding the mention of drivers for wireless pcmcia cards not being available for 10.2 and http://wirelessdriver.sourceforge.net not having been updated in months;

An announcement was sent to the wirelessdriver announce list over the weekend stating;

=-=-=
Hi all,

I've (finally) posted a build of the driver built for OS X 10.2 to my iDisk. The can be reached via the following URL: <http://homepage.mac.com/robm>

This installer is a preliminary release. I will post to SourceForge in the usual place and make an announcement to VerstionTracker once I've had a few feedback reports.

This build is, essentially, a top-of-tree build from the CVS archives. I have made several changes to it to support compilation under Jaguar and have added a few lines of code towards trying to solve the AppleTalk issue, although I haven't had any opportunity to test that yet.

Let me know how you make out with it and I'll get whatever changes done that need to be made and make a final announcement.

-Rob McKeever
robm@mac.com
=-=-=

sshAgentServices alternatives (while U wait)

[graffitiboy]

Like the gui? Try the very nice SSH Agent built in apple's project builder with source (yay).

If you want to see the shell script that's ultimately under this, Apple made it in csh.

A decent csh (or tcsh) script for running ssh-agent at login is described by apple Here. I have the "terminal.app" on my dock, and the script described goes into my login. I just have to run ssh-add, and from then on my applications do fine.

I rewrote it for my .bash_login and pulled a lot out of it, and dropped it here:

# for ssh-agent (magic!)
# first check the ssh_agent_state temp file
export SSH_AGENT_STATE="/tmp/.ssh-agent-state.$USER"
if
[ -f "$SSH_AGENT_STATE" ]; # tempfile exists?
then
source "$SSH_AGENT_STATE";
if
[ ! -S "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ]; # socket writeable?
then
echo INFO: ssh-agent needs to be restarted
rm -f "$SSH_AGENT_STATE";
echo INFO: starting ssh-agent
ssh-agent -s | grep -v '^echo ' > "${SSH_AGENT_STATE}";
source "${SSH_AGENT_STATE}";
echo INFO: ssh-agent started [ $SSH_AGENT_PID ]
else
echo INFO: ssh-agent already running [ $SSH_AGENT_PID ]
ssh-add -l
fi
else # no tempfile, start the agent clean
echo INFO: starting ssh-agent
ssh-agent -s | grep -v '^echo ' > "${SSH_AGENT_STATE}";
source "${SSH_AGENT_STATE}";
echo INFO: ssh-agent started [ $SSH_AGENT_PID ]
ssh-add -l
fi

Apple Remote Desktop

[artfulbodger]

Apple Remote Desktop 1.0.x doesn't work; you'll need to run Software Update to get version 1.1. Unfortunately, even the new version only half-worked for me; the client side seems fine, but the Admin app says it is not installed properly. I wanted to just uninstall the whole thing and start over, but there is no uninstall option, that I could find. So I deleted all the files that the Installer installs, and then tried to reinstall, and the Installer says it is already installed. So now I have nothing, and I can't change it.

I noticed this "not installed properly" stuff on OS X 10.1 actually, and it took a few tries to get it to work. ( I think I ended up having to delete coresponding files in /Library/Receipts, to get OS X to think it hadn't installed it in the first place.)

In general Remote Desktop is really not a very good program, and needs some serious updating. It's buggy, slow, and the UI really blows. The thing that really gets me is that it uses the "Computer Name" (AppleShare) as unique IDs for clients, I would much prefer hostname/IP address for my enviroment.

Re:Rendezvous doesn't fix problems with peer-peer

[foobar104]

The DNS-less stuff doesn't work either. It doesn't find any of my other machines.

Rendezvous can only find other machines on the LAN that also support Rendezvous. It won't help you find your OS/2 machine or your eComStation (wtf?) machine.

All I want is a nice simple host table . On Linux or OS/2 I could easily add all of my host table entries in under a minute.

You can do it on your Mac, too. Starting in 10.2, your host table works just like you'd expect. In 10.0 and 10.1, lookupd was configured to ignore /etc/hosts, but in 10.2 it's set up differently by default. You can confirm this by looking at the output of lookupd -configuration.

LookupOrder: Cache FF DNS NI DS
_config_name: Host Configuration

(Among other stuff)

That means that lookupd will try to resolve host names by looking first in its own cache, then in the flat files (/etc/hosts, in this case), then in the DNS system, then in NetInfo. All this is documented in the man page.

All the other items in your list of complaints have similarly simple fixes. Except, of course, for that shit about OS/2 compatibility. What's that about?

Re:AvantGo..and Alternatives

[Spencerian]

I simply refused to go without my beloved web sites downloaded to my Palm when I made the switch a year ago. This link at Mac OS X Hints gave me that alternative--Plucker.

While a bit more hands-on than AvantGo, you get very similar, if not identical results with Plucker. (This is open source, so Linux guys who switched from Windows can get it too.) Be mindful that these instructions were based on 10.1 and not 10.2: the needed Python parts may have an issue from the binaries, so I'd compile it if I were you.

Re:NeXTSTEP scrollbars?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the right-handed NeXTies I knew thought left-hand scrollbars were kind of weird at first, but came to prefer them. Mostly it has to do with how most of your attention (and usually your cursor, when doing text entry) is focused on the left side of the window in a left-to-right written language.

Reinstalling Apple Remote Desktop

[adjusting]

Did you delete all the receipts before trying to reinstall?

You can find them in /Library/Receipts/
I believe the ones related to remote desktop are:
RDAdmin.pkg
RDClient.pkg
RDClientUpdateFor 10_2.pkg
RDDocs.pkg
RemoteDesktopUpdateFor10_2.p kg

or you can use mol.

[iso9660]

If you have a slower machine like my 366 MHz G3-based iBook, MacOS X isn't going to be fast enough. 10.1 wasn't, and I doubt 10.2 is. I haven't heard of any dramatic speed improvements.

But there is a nice solution: use Linux with MacOnLinux (http://www.maconlinux.org). It is very nice. It allows you to run MacOS 9 as a linux application, either in a window in Xfree86 (slow), or fullscreen (very fast), and as long as you don't play graphically demanding games, it's almost as fast as running "pure" MacOS.
and if MacOS crashes, you just restart mol :)

I use MacOS mainly for school work (have to have Ms office, sorry open source puritans, but openOffice is just not good enough yet) and do everything else in linux. Then I use netatalk (linux appletalk daemons) to move files to and from my linux partitions. Works flawlessly.

I also use netatalk to print from macos. MacOS has never supported my printer (hp deskjet 600) but linux does. I make MacOS believe it is a laserwriter 8 (generic postscript, basically) and use apsfilter to convert the postscript to HP PCL. It works very nicely, and is a good example of the Power Of Open Source Software, imho :)

Try mol if you have an older mac, it's very useful.

Re:How many copies of OS X 10.2 can you use at onc

[phillymjs]

This is nothing new, Apple has just never offered people the option of a discount on multiple licenses before-- but you should be buying one copy of the Mac OS for each Mac you have, if you want to stick to the letter of the EULA. I would assume this is the case for all versions of the Mac OS not freely available for download from Apple.

However, should you not want to comply with that, there's no product-activation type crapola going on. Feel free to install one licensed copy of Jaguar on all the machines you want, there is no built-in, technical means to prevent you from running it simultaneously on multiple Macs. You'll just be violating the terms of the license.

~Philly

Re:Smile

[gig]

> People buy PC's because of price, Mac's because of style...

I buy Macs because they just work. I used to build my own PC systems, but now I just buy a new Mac ever 2-3 years and get everything I need in one purchase, along with a great service contract (AppleCare), and an OS feature called Software Update that automatically keeps all the included software (Mac OS X, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, etc.) current. Now I spend less overall, too, because I don't have to upgrade piecemeal to make up for what the vendor left out. For example, the oldest of the four Macs here is from January, 1999, and it has FireWire, USB, a 15" flat panel display, and 1.5GB RAM. It runs Mac OS X great (especially 10.2) and can edit DV, be a jukebox, play DVD's, burn CD's and all kinds of other stuff that people are doing TODAY with computers. It also has space for four hard drives and three empty PCI slots. That computer has paid for itself again and again and again and it is still trucking. It does have style as well ... translucent blue display, tower, mouse, and keyboard look beautiful ... that's just candy, though ... an extra.

Re:My 10.1 beefs..Resolved? Anyone?

[Apotsy]

Just about every OS X app still limits you to Mac's 31. GRRR. Is this just a limit for "carbonized" apps?

It's got nothing to do with a limitation on Carbon, it's just those straggling developers who have not updated to the latest file dialog APIs. Newer NavServices dialogs give full 255 char Unicode-aware filenames. It's just a matter of getting developers to use them (they've been around since 10.0, you'd think they would get on the ball at some point).

Finder won't show .hidden files. THIS is UNIX?

Try this:

> defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles True

Then logout/log back in.

Re:My 10.1 beefs..Resolved? Anyone?

[JamieF]

TinkerTool will let you show system and hidden files.