Mac OS X 10.4.1 Is Out

MrBadbar writes "Software Update just informed me that an update to Mac OS X (10.4.1) is now available. The updates include mail, address book, dashboard widgets, Safari, iLife, and other miscellaneous fixes. At this rate, it's only about 18 more weeks until 10.5."

Comments

A couple of notes

[daveschroeder]

First of all, Mac OS X 10.4 has been complete since March 28. So while it wasn't released until April 29, Mac OS X 10.4.1 has been in development for over six weeks.

Second, Mac OS X 10.4.1 completely fixes the the widget auto-installation issue by adding widgets to the items that Safari prompts for before a download is complete. You will now receive a notice:

"(file) is an application. Are you sure you want to download the application (file)?"

...including when Safari is in its default state, i.e., "Open 'safe' files after downloading" is enabled. This issue is now completely mitigated, as no item can be downloaded or installed without the user's express knowledge and permission. Therefore, this issue is now closed.

Re:A couple of notes

[jdb8167]

Mac OS X 10.4.1 completely fixes the the widget auto-installation issue

I can confirm this. I would disagree on the "completely" but it is certainly good enough for now. It would be better if you couldn't override existing widgets and even better if Apple supplied an advanced button that allowed me to control the sandbox that is built in to Dashboard. As it stands now, Apple has a working sandbox with various levels of security which is completely useless because it isn't exposed to the end user. What is the point of having a AllowFullAccess boolean if the developer can add it without any controls by the user?

Also, do you know if this fixes the 1GB sparse image problem? I see a HFS resource fork issue vaguely mentioned in the developer release notes but I have no idea if that is the sparse image problem or not.

No, not quite...

[daveschroeder]

"They" (Apple) weren't supposed to fix anything having to do with VPN clients in 10.4.1.

Making VPN clients work with 10.4.x is completely up to the vendors, and all vendors have had all the information and everything they have fundamentally needed, from a developer standpoint, to make their clients work with Tiger since *last June*.

There is absolutely no reason all of the VPN client vendors shouldn't have had their clients out on April 29 alongside Tiger. Any feigned surprise on their part, or finger pointing at Apple, is completely bullshit. Yes, Tiger changed how things work which "broke" the old clients. But they've also had almost a year to fix it.

Re:Installed fine here...

[skingers6894]

I installed 10.4.1 update without incident.

BUT I had a problem earlier with a grinding noise in the hard-disk area on my powerbook.

Turned out to be that the hard disk was faulty.

IDE type Hard drives have an area of space reserved for "reallocating" bad sectors. If your disk is really bad this area will fill up. When there is no more space left to reallocate to you will get a SMART error.

Click on "About this Mac", click "more info" and select your drive from the ATA section. You will see the SMART status there.

If you get this then you need to replace the drive.

I ended up replacing my drive with a 7200RPM Momentus - MAN I'm happy the old one died now!

Re:Wireless reception lower

[kegger64]

Your signal strength isn't any lower with Tiger. The AirPort signal strength indicator has actually been retooled to show, not the signal strength, but the speed of the connection. This is a change from Panther.

Re:FUD'ly AC

[GaryPatterson]

... and from VirtualPC, you have to do that while standing upside down on one hand, with Yoda on one foot banging you with a stick while you try to balance rocks with your mind. ... and then your X-Wing sinks. I hate it when that happens.

Re:Quartz 2D Extreme

[Yaztromo]

This update still did not enable Quartz 2D-Extreme on my system, so on a hunch, I enabled it manually, as per this hint, and wow... Really nice!

That hint enables Q2DX the hard way. The easier way is to open a terminal and paste in the following command:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver Quartz2DExtremeEnabled 1

HTH!

Yaz.

Re:SMB no change

[tyagiUK]

I had problems connecting to my Samba server running on Debian when I first installed 10.4.

It appears as though 10.4 requires the password exchange to be encrypted, so in the smb.conf file:

; encrypt passwords = false

(note the semi colon).

I used to run plaintext passwords with 10.3 for some reason. I think it was because 10.3 didn't like encrypted password exchange with Samba, but I may be mistaken (poor memory).