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Mac OS X 10.2 Technote Released
Etcetera writes "Apple has released their Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) Technote chock-full of useful information about the API and technical changes in Jaguar. Interested parties will find lots of neat stuff in here... including the idea of storing kernel panic info in NVRAM and writing it to a logfile on reboot."
Linux users should appreciate some of the nice changes in the BSD section. Some are just the sort of window dressing we've come to expect like making bash the default shell, but others such as PAM, and replacing inetd with xinetd, show that Apple is trying to focus just as much on offering a solid, competitive Unix as they are trying to give it a friendly face. (Note: By 'competitive', I mean competing with the current 'best of breed' Linux distributions)
Fuck Slashdot
Beneficiaries that immediately spring to mind are children and vision-impaired.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
maybe in preparation for higher resolutions (dpi) which will be becoming more mainstream soon.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
I've always thought that cursors should be in a vector format and then be scaled to whatever size the user wants.
:)
But then again... no one ever listens to me...
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
> including the idea of storing kernel panic info in NVRAM and writing it to a logfile on reboot
AIX has done this for years. Another example of what you can do when you control hardware and software.
After reading all the scary news about HP switching to palidome and seeing IBM already has it. I am strongly considering a mac. As soon as the dying g4 is replaced hopefully with IBM's powerpc I will look into upgrading.
MacOSX is finally turning into a more traditional unix with Xf86 support, now automake as well as some nice speed enhancments. I tested jaguar out at compusa and its a hell of alot faster. Everything loads in a second or two. (or may have seemed fast compared to my pentium700 running w2k.)
Good job apple!
http://saveie6.com/
Yep! Was going to post it but since you did I won't. I just covered that when taking some AIX training. This feature isn't revolutionary but it is a good idea. You save all of that last minute what caused the kernel to panic stuff so you can then forward it to IBM and see if it's a kernel issue or whatever. I really think that Apple will choose the IBM chips. Those who think they will go down the X86 path are mistaken. IBM makes some of the best servers I have ever seen on every platform including X86 machines.
Gorkman
- The Ruby scripting language is now installed with Mac OS X
- Python 2.1.1 is now installed with Mac OS X
- The tool "automake" is now installed with Mac OS X
- The curses library has been updated to the newer ANSI compliant ncurses library, which supports color and other advanced text attributes as well as offering greatly increased compatibility with applications which rely on having a standards-compliant curses library.
Not bad, eh?Note the BSD section includes the fact that Python 2.1.1 is installed with Mac OS X. This ought to make some folks happy (myself included).
In order to reduce application launch times, the kernel now maintains information about the working set of an application between launches (in "/var/vm/app_profile"). Pre-heat files are meant to be transparent to the user; however, developers who are constantly re-working their applications may find that their pre-heat files are getting large. The files may become clogged with out-of-date profiles on applications who's versions have changed. As a result, developers may find that it is good to clear out the old pre-heat files on test machines once in a while. To do this, become super-user and do a rm -r /private/var/vm/app_profile and then reboot. app_profile is the directory which contains the profile files. The directory is automatically re-created on reboot. (r. 2847332).
Hmm. Wonder if this will slow down my nightly upgrade of Chimera, Mozilla, etc?
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Wanna bet?
Big cursors do help the low vision impaired, (like me).
Try standing 200 or 300 feet from your monitor and get back to me.
You don't need NVRAM--kernel panics don't result in a loss of dynamic RAM contents. Just write the data into a known chunk of RAM. Of course, on PCs, the BIOS may clear that, but that's a problem with the BIOS. The technique is much, much older than AIX.
Apple really needs to support X11 officially alongside with Cocoa and Carbon. Vendors of OSX software (e.g., Matlab) clearly want to use it. Users need it for tens of thousands of educational and scientific packages that are not going to get rewritten. Supporting X11 would be very little cost or overhead, and it would make the machines a lot more interesting and attractive for scientific and engineering uers.
Large cursor support
64x64 cursors will also be a boon to those trying to implement a game interface using as much of the basic APIs as you can (always a good idea if you can manange it).
This makes it a lot easier to use Windows fonts in OS X. It isn't a big deal, they're just checking off that last box on the list.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
But cursors in current machines are hardware drawn (quite an good performance improvement actually) and current hardware doesn't do vector cursors.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'll expand his point
the dpi of your monitor is probably effectivly 96, but suppose someone has a 600dpi monitor (damn that would be expensive..). When your GUI "set up" the monitor, it would compile the cursors into a bitmap for the apropriate dpi.
The video card would still get fed a bitmap yes, but it would only require one cursor for all future screens (think ttf fonts)
I live in a giant bucket.
Interested parties will find lots of neat stuff in here... including the idea of storing kernel panic info in NVRAM and writing it to a logfile on reboot.
Huh? Except for writing into RAM instead of NVRAM (which is almost always sufficient), versions of UNIX and other OSes in the 1980s always did this. This is essentially what dmesg(8) is for.
Please stop making me feel old. Kids these days... :-)
My favorite change: the printing system was been replaced with CUPS, allowing Mac OS X users with printers from companies who enjoy screwing Mac users (*cough* Epson *cough*) to use Gimp-Print drivers. Hoorah, open source support!
How to install the Gimp-Print drivers is detailed here. It's trivial.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Are cursors that big really that necessary?
In addition to the vision impaired and ungodly resolution points already mentioned, it's good for Hollywood-style interfaces. Means you'll see more Mac OS X in TV shows and movies. Or games with funky cursors.
True Type font files with the extension '.ttf' are now recognized in Mac OS X. (r. 2823850).
Funny--I never thought they were needed. Fonts have always looked better on Macs...nothing wrong with support I suppose.
Mac and PC TrueType fonts were always close enough that you could convert between one or the other. Apple has just made the conversion step unnecessary.
Sun's old OpenView used to have all its cursors as fonts. Great fun changing it. Well, a little fun at least.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
From a trouble shooting point of view, it's very useful and time saving.
In a bid to win over MS Windows users who up until now have been worried about loosing the registry bloat of their OS, Apple has invented an equivalent that gradually fills up with cruft and needs purging once in a while. Hehe :-D
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
r just go here for complete instructions http://www.ryandesign.com/jagboot/
--
Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things.
This is a bit offtopic, but is there any projects making use of the ipsec API in OSX to do VPN connectivity? The 'VPN' used in MacOS is PPTP by default, and I would like to integrate an OSX system into the VPN configuration here for free..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Apple is still fighting with application developers to get them to Carbonize their apps. Carbon blows, big time. It's a stopgap solution crafted solely to allow ports from OS 9. (If you are developing a brand-new program for Carbon, allow me to BITCH-SLAP you out of the 80's with the clue stick a few times. ) Apple, and anyone with a brain, knows this. Apple's ultimate plan is to ditch Carbon like a hooker bad case of genital warts.
;)
This is total nonsense. Carbon might not be as easy as Cocoa, but you can do just about everything with it that you can also do in Cocoa (and vice versa). In fact, Cocoa and Carbon are more and more achieving parity. You can choose the solution that you like best and nobody will know*.
*Except that one of the two results in apps that start faster and can run on an old OS that still has a big following.
Carbon ties Apple to the Motorola PPC platform which is looking more and more like an evolutionary trichordate (good potential, slow development causes it to be overwhelmed by the competition).
Why? Carbon is a total rewrite, I doubt that it's not portable (why wouldn't it be?). Again, uninformed FUD. Especially if you know that MacOS 7 was ported to x86 by Apple (the Star Trek project). Do you think a port would be impossible for the cleaned up version of (essentially) the same API?
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
Are cursors that big really that necessary?
When screen resolution is high enough, yes.
a fabulous semi-aqua carbon manager written in Carbon. check it out.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Thje Technote fails to mention the best thing about 10.2 -- the kernel is compiled to support ktrace(1). In 10.1, the kernel was not compiled to support ktrace.
/proc. It shows you everything
For you linux people out there -- ktrace is a little like truss or strace, but it relies on tracepoints in the kernel, rather than
the kernel is doing on your process' behalf, even things which may not show up as a system call (like signal posting). And following forks actually works.
You also said that you dl'd the xterm sources and re-built it. Well and good, but there's been a package for this since round about the time Jag was released. I pointed out that there's no need for a build - just grab the xterm updater and go.
I'd say your comments were largely right-on & g4dget needs to wake up & read the responses ...
Slashdot is just a boys club isn't it?
There Is No Cabal. (They made me say that! ;-) )
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
And people with a higher resolution display. Maybe the next Cinema Display?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
And the scaling algorithm is already there for icons. And I'm not even going to mention Quartz Extreme.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I think it might just be easier to make a giant 256x256 cursor in that case. Display resolutions go up slowly enough that "cursor scaling technology" really isn't something to bother about :)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
We'll the .ttf font cam e in handy already, when somebody need an odd cyrilic file opened that used its own font. from the pc world. *Poof* Worked like a champ.
Mod point free since 2001
Furthermore, if there is no binary package for something in fink, fink has to recompile the sources, and that does require downloading and installing the development environment.
You both display the kind of geekiness in your attitudes that Macintosh is supposed to protect users from. Come on, the main reason to use a Macintosh over some other UNIX workstation is that it "just works". Anything that requires downloading and fiddling around dozens of megabytes of stuff and going into the command line doesn't "just work".
Not that I do, but if you have a display that's around 4000+ / 2500+, those 64x64 cursors start to look about right. Smaller ones are nearly impossible to see.
You don't *need* fink to install X! Want me to say it again?
X just works on Jaguar. More and more X11 apps are being packaged for that 1-click(tm) response that Mac users are so accustomed to.
Sure, you and I use fink - but then again I suspect you and I don't run the average X11 apps, either. The GIMP is now available as a .pkg download for the Mac. Download & click, buy the CD and click, whichever. It JUST WORKS .....
I don't know where you're getting your "fiddling around dozens of megabytes of stuff and going into the command line", 'coz it doesn't apply in this case.
[Full disclosure: I work for Apple as a developer but right now, I'm speaking for myself. Just before someone else brings this up]
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
I have had to help too many people to get a working X11 environment on OSX: it doesn't "just work". Maybe the server starts up with a couple of clicks, if you are lucky, but there is more to do. A well-integrated version of X11 would allow people to just double click on any X11 application and run it just like a Carbon application on an out-of-the-box Mac, with standard OSX window management, transparency support, and hardware acceleration.
However, on setting up X on Jaguar, I disagree. Download two pkgs and double-click 'em - how easy can it get?
It can get as easy as not having to think about it at every upgrade, not having to download 53Mbytes, like I don't have to on other UNIX workstations. It can get as easy as making the differences between X11 and Cocoa as small as those between Carbon and Cocoa from the user's point of view.
If Apple wants to be in the scientific and engineering workstation market, they have to make it as easy as that, because otherwise OSX is a lot more hassle than a UNIX workstation.
Now you can say Apple has had this feature since OS X 1.2 errr 10.2!
GPL Deconstructed