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Mac OS X Panther 10.3 Reviewed
JigSaw writes "OSNews posted a (constructively) critical, but also favorable review of Mac OS X Panther 10.3. The article discusses the new features, what works great and what's still sour, and it also includes a plethora of screenshots." The review's conclusion suggests Panther is "...a worthy operating system, easy to use, easy to set up, easy to get pleased by it. It just works."
Say what you will about Microsoft, but they do spent enormous effort trying to avoid this problem on each release
I can't really comment on how MS addresses this problem, but it is a problem for Apple. The root cause is the way OS seeds are distributed - for better or for worse, the seeding program for Mac OS X is quite different from how things used to work. The GM was declared several weeks ago (build 7B85), however this build is not available to Apple's main developer program.
It was released to Premier developers (the top-end subscription, which is several thousand dollars a year) about two days ago, but right now the vast majority of 3rd party developers have no way to test if their software works on 10.3 or not. Until a couple of days ago, the only people who access to seeds were the "big name" developers who exist outside of the seeding program (Adobe, Microsoft - people with specific products which are critical to areas important to Apple) or people who had obtained a copy through BitTorrent.
I've been in the Premier program in previous lives, and can attest that even that is no guarantee you'll get a seed - for some of the early Mac OS X releases, we paid several thousand dollars a year and yet had to wait for the CDs to get to customers before we could get a build. It's up to Apple how they run their own program obviously, but a direct consequence of this was that we didn't bother renewing at that level - and it looks like this has held true, as this year the Premier program is getting access a whole 10 days before it hits the shops.
Apple has an Up-To-Date offer to buy v10.3 for $19.95, for those who've bought a Mac on or after October 8.
However, I bought my new 15" Powerbook a few days after it was announced last month (around Sep 18 or so) and plugged my serial # in for kicks. Lo and behold, I qualified!
I've heard rumors it's unofficially extended back just for certain systems....
The spinning pizza of death problem is still there with the remote volume mount. I gave it about three minutes before I rebooted yesterday. The volume may have eventually re-mounted, but past experience just made me give the powerbook a three finger salute. It is without a doubt the biggest pain in the ass for mac users. The audio bug seems to be fixed. I did notice after the install of the GM build that I got that "white noise" sound when the finder loaded, but that has since not returned. All in all though, 10.3 is a very solid release. Much, much snappier. G3 owner will really notice a big difference.
Every last one of these was fixed for me in 10.2.8 except Bluetooth (that broke, but panther fixed it).
And the problem with remote volumes will "resolve itself" after 2-20 minutes of inactivity. I haven't yet tried it in panther. Guess I should.
The volume thing was definitely fixed with 10.2.8 because it used to annoy the hell out of me and I'd almost rue and lament (but not regret) the times I would change the volume.
Nope. Still read-only, and zero sftp support. Tried that just yesterday. On the upside, it's MUCH more stable and doesn't hang when disconnecting or coming out of sleep.
From the help file:
To connect to FTP servers, type the DNS name or IP address for the server like this:
ftp://DNSname
Note: From the Finder you connect to FTP servers with read-only access. To copy files to an FTP server, use another program such as Safari.
That last one threw me for a loop. Safari? What the heck...?
You can do a clean install of just the operating system and still keep all of your data. It's called an "archive install".
As for the Applications you'll either have to reinstall what doesn't come with Mac OS or you can probably just move them to your local Applications folder (~/Applications/) before the install and then move them back to
Sapere aude!