Slashdot Mirror
Mac OS X Tiger Released and Analyzed
bonch writes "Ars Technica has gone under the hood of the Tiger release and offers up detailed impressions on the new OS X update. The review covers everything from interface changes, new kernel updates and programming interfaces, the unification of UNIX system startup services into one service called 'launchd', the return of metadata, to the fact Apple has announced that from 10.4 forward there will be no more API changes. A fascinating read about the technical details behind Tiger and the specific changes that have occurred since Panther's release 18 months ago." Today is the update's official launch day, though some lucky people have had it for a few days already.
Another in-depth review, focusing more on features and less on the OS's underbelly is over at MacInTouch... http://www.macintouch.com/tigerreview/index.shtml
If it's your whole machine that's crashing (i.e. kernel panic) then look to bad or under-spec RAM first, not the OS. OS X machines are very particular about RAM.
Damn those pesky terrorists
if you tell it to "Use secure virtual memory." /var/vm/ appeared to contain a uniform 128-bit pattern, I had thought at first that Apple was simply preventing user-space processes from reading them, but this is fortunately not the limit of 10.4's virtual memory protection.
As evidenced by profiling in Shark, page faults can trigger decryption. I was initially worried--as files in
Tiger ships with these importers
a rks.mdimporter
iCal.mdimportert err r d.mdimporter
/Library/Spotlight/
o soft Office.mdimporterd importer
/Library/Spotlight. It's a fairly trivial task.
In System/Library/Spotlight/
Application.mdimporter
Audio.mdimporter
Bookm
Chat.mdimporter
Font.mdimporter
Image.mdimporter
iPhoto.mdimpor
Mail.mdimporter
PDF.mdimporter
PS.mdimporte
QuartzComposer.mdimporter
QuickTime.mdimporter
RichText.mdimporter
SystemPrefs.mdimporter
vCa
In
AppleWorks.mdimporter
Keynote.mdimporter
Micr
Pages.mdimporter
SourceCode.m
If you install XCode 2.0 (free with OSX 10.4) it contains template project code to create your own metadata importers. The OpenOffice people would need to create an importer and stick it in
Perhaps they'd like to port OpenOffice first though.
> I have two words for you:
> 1. Spotlight
> 2. Dashboard
I got my copy of Tiger yesterday, so I installed it last night. Dashboard is cool, where I spent way too long adding and removing widgets just so I could watch the ripple effect (I've got a 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 17" with 1 GB RAM). It's kind of like when everyone spent about 30 minutes doing the Genie effect when they got Mac OS X 10.0 Beta. Random cool things:
1. When it's sunny outside, the sun from the Weather widget spills out above it, gently illuminating the other things on the desktop. That's cool
2. The Address Book widget is fast and makes AddressBook far more usable. Just type in a name, and boom! you have their info.
3. The Calendar widget is next to useless. I thought it would show me my iCal events for the day or something, but no such luck. It just sits there, red and unaware.
4. I find this hard to believe but QuickTime 7 looks much better than QuickTime 6. I watched the large Star Wars Episode III trailer in it, and it appears to look far more detailed! You can actually see Anakin's complexion turning gray when he's talking to Palpatine!
5. Spotlight is really cool. It took about 30 minutes to index, but once it was done. I searched on a few terms. It found emails I wrote six years ago that I forgot I received. It's very fast. Type in someone's name, and in one second, you can see all sorts of stuff about them on your hard drive. Basically, your Mac turns into a giant contact manager (if you've ever gotten one of those PIMs to work where it tracked files, emails, and whatever for contacts). I'm getting used to the idea of using SpotLight to look for a file or application before I even go to the Finder, and it works well. SpotLight has earned its place in a hallowed corner place on the screen.
6. iChat can now display what song you're listening to in iTunes. That's cool, too!
7. The mouse preferences has a place to adjust the sensitivity of the scroll wheel and which to make the primary mouse button (left or right).
8. When Safari can't open a page (like this Ars-Technica page right now), it displays an error page, rather than a slide down dialog box. It's less obtrusive this way.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
DotNet does not work as advertised (EG: have you seen any commercial apps in it?)
.NET connected directory
.NET framework with the Mono project? No, .NET is completely unsuccessful (BTW, I wrote and run an ecommerce application for my company of employ on .NET that does over $20k/day in business. Sounds like production quality to me.)
- Dell's Website
- MIT's iLab and ShuttleTrak services
- T-Mobile's customer portal
- Infragistics website and software solutions
- Any one of the items listed in Microsoft's
Or perhaps you would like to look at the massive amount of work that has gone into emulating the
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
The Tiger Direct vs. Apple Computer lawsuit is an almost completely baseless suit designed for one purpose: advertising. Tiger Direct is attempting to catch a ride on the back of Apple's Tiger marketing campaign. They don't have any intention to stop Apple from using the Tiger name.
If Apple were renaming all of their Apple Stores to Tiger Stores, they might have some grounds. As it is, Tiger Direct is a computer hardware reseller, and Mac OSX 10.4 Tiger is an operating system. It's only slightly more related than the US Census Bureau's registered trademark on TIGER for its GIS data.
Also, Tiger Direct is complaining about search rankings, but a quick google for "tiger" shows Apple at a distant 4th to Tiger Direct's 2nd place ranking (behind a page on, surprise, actual tigers).
SELECT quote.text AS sig FROM quote NATURAL JOIN attribute WHERE attribute.description = 'witty';
0 rows returned
Here is the official list of supported hardware.h tml
http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/requirements.
You will find that a lot of older hardware works, just not as well as you would hope.
YMMV.
Everything I had loaded ran fine, including some APE stuff with a few haxies. Even GeekTool continued to run, which really surprised me. Office for Mac (2004) ran fine for me after the upgrade, although Word crashed the first time I opened it. (Maybe a coincidence.)
:)
The biggest annoyance for me right now is that fink and darwinports are partially broken. Ethereal continued to run (which was not expected), but glib appears to be broken so irssi won't run for me right now. That's OK, I needed an IRC break anyway.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
There is a growing library of Spotlight plugins, http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/spotlight/
No need to clone it, from TFA:
The advantages of this approach are the following:
- All those daemon have shared functionality but different code, this means more code to maintain and more security risks (all those daemon have to run at some point as root). Each of the 'old' daemon also has a different file format, which does not make life easier either.
- Process launch criteria can be a mix of those offered by the 'old' daemons, crond is based on time, inetd on network connections, initd on boot sequence. Launchd 'understands" all those notions.
The example I was given was of starting a backup task on a laptop. The criteria to launch the task would be something like if last execution was more than X days ago and the computer is not running on battery power and there is a network connection and CPU load has been low for some time then launch... Launchd is supposed to have 'adapters' to understand the old file formats.Personally I think this is a good idea, factoring out common functionality and using more reasonable file formats, but of course the old guard will complain that the current set of daemon just works (not on a laptop) and that this was proposed by people who do not understand Unix - who is this Jordan Hubbard anyway? :-)
Why develop something as impressive as Quartz 2D Extreme and then leave it turned off by default? My inquiries to Apple have gone unanswered, so I can only speculate about the reasoning behind this decision. My best guess is that all of the bugs could not be excised from Q2DE in time for Tiger's launch date, and that it will be enabled by default in a subsequent update--perhaps as early as version 10.4.1."
I told you so.
I posted this on LiveJournal too..
:P )
Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) comes out this Friday, April 29th. It only ships on *DVD-ROM MEDIA* - if you want it on CD-ROM, you'll have to order the $9.99 CD-ROM set from Apple, and jump through a few other hoops (I don't remember what they are offhand)
If you don't want to wait, here's how to install it using Target Disk Mode. This will require *two* Macs, both equipped with Firewire.
* Take the Mac with the DVD-ROM drive (Mac #1) and insert the 10.4 DVD.
* Power the non-DVD Mac off.
* Plug the Firewire cable into Mac #2.
* Plug the other end of the cable into Mac #1.
* Boot Mac #2 with the letter "T" held down. Hold it down until you see the Firewire logo appear on the screen.
* Wait a few seconds. Mac #2 will appear as a Firewire volume on the desktop of Mac #1.
The 10.4 DVD contains the 10.4 Installer - double click it, and it'll ask you to reboot. Go ahead and let it reboot. The installation procedure will be just like you were installing it on your local machine, but when it asks you which volume to install it onto, select the Firewire volume (Mac #2) and go from there. It's safe to have it reformat & install (unless you want to just do an "upgrade" which is rarely recommended.)
Once the installation is complete, it'll want you to reboot again. Go ahead and reboot. As soon as the machine powered off for the reboot, yank the Firewire cable out of both machines. Mac #2 will still have the Firewire logo, but that's ok. Just force reset it with the reset button.
Mac #2 will boot up & walk you through the Mac OS X 10.4 setup assistant.
At this point, you're done. Software Update will run once you get to the desktop. Have fun!
(Hopefully this will stave off the "Wah, I don't have a DVD-ROM.. how can I pirate teh Tiger??" crowd.
You should probably be aware that that's a really good way to destroy your iPod.
The hard drive in the iPod isn't designed for sustained use. Booting off of it and installing Tiger should probably take about a half hour. That might be okay. But it's an oft-repeated and I think true story that one of the engineers somewhere here on campus installed Mac OS X Server onto his iPod for testing and booted it up in a lab.
The iPod froze up after eighteen hours. The hard drive completely failed.
Just FYI. Caveat emptor and all that.
If you get info on a file, there is a "Spotlight Comments" field which works as expected.
Your computer came with a CD labeled something along the lines of "Hardware Test." (The exact verbiage varies from computer to computer.) Stick it in, boot the computer with the "c" key held down on the keyboard to force it to run from the disc.
Run the hardware test suite. This will identify any failing RAM by slot for you.
You provided a reference to an FSF document to support your reasoning. The cited web page says, in part:
Granted, the APSL does not prohibit users of the software to link with proprietary libraries, thus is not a "copyleft" license. So, what? This is less restrictive than the GPL, not more. This, in and of itself does not preclude Linux users from using it on their systems.
The FSF concludes that it is ok to use and improve software which other people release under this license.
You would be allowed to compile the daemons using gcc and glibc libraries and use them with no problem from the APSL. You would also be allowed to link GPLd programs against the supporting APSL licensed frameworks.
The only limitation is that if you ship an improved version of this code that you make that code available to others under APSL terms. i.e. you provide source code so that Apple and and other users of the APSLed code benefit from the changes.
Insisting on re-inventing every wheel just so that everything is covered under GPL is a waste of effort. It steals time of those working on GPLed code from doing other work, and selfishly prevents others from benefit from you good ideas if you improve a fork of the work rather than the original work itself.
It strikes me as foolish that GNU/Linux people spend so much effort to mimic other people's work, re-implementing large subsystems just to get them under the GPL umbrella, rather than cooperating with others to re-use and improve the best code available.
a "fix" for the button toolbar change in Mail 2.0, in case you loathe it and prefer the old style...
Completely different, as near as I can tell. Daemontools looks more like watchdog, which launchd obsoletes.
/etc/rc.d, /etc/init.d, cron, at, SystemStarter and watchdog.
The launchd service is responsible for launching services on demand, be that at boot time, at login time, or upon network connection. It's responsible for automatically detecting dependencies, and for firing off tasks in parallel whenever possible.
The launchd service replaces (hold your breath) init, rc,
And yes, the configuration files are all property lists.