Slashdot Mirror
Apple Releases OS X 10.4.2 Update
kenthorvath was one of many readers to note that "Apple has quietly released an update for OS X Tiger. New features include a widget manager for dashboard and some 200 bug fixes and enhancements."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Kind of freaky.
Seems okay now, though.
Now I can finally use H.261 to iChat with my friends. Joy!
Incase anyone's wondering, this update doesn't seem to include a patch to zlib to fix the buffer overflow in it.
Just got it. The Widgets manager was very need after my collection included some widgets that I did not really want.
So Apple releases new features in the same patch they fix bugs in?
I think Apple is borrowing Microsoft's business practices... that will teach MS for stealing Apple's interface ideas!
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
it is 34% more snappy, and applicaions open with 21% less DBs(dock bounces) than 10.4.1
Everytime there is a post about an apple update it always says "Quietly released". What the hell do you want Apple to do? Major newspaper headlines? Have Steve Jobs land a helicopter in your front yard to tell you the news? Christ, it's a minor update.
For the Apple Computer 10.4.2 Release Extravaganza! Fireworks! Fun! Special guest host David Hasslehoff will wrestle a real live grizzly bear for a corned beef sandwich! See it all on FOX!
While I love being able to text search in content, spotlight is so horribly beta I'm almost at the point of disabling it. The thing keeping me from that is that I'd lose my mail search.
The problems with spolight are well known now but I'll recite them:
1) doesn't let you finish typing before it searches. Yeah that was supposed to be a feature, but apparently it wont halt and discard the first search as you try to type. If you are a slow typist and qimply type the letter followed by a pause before typing "uicktime", for example, you have to wait while it finds every document witha Q in it. You cant stop it. No hacker has yet reporeted finding where they store the default time delay so you can adjust it.
2) When you sort by date you can only sort by last access date not creation date. Worse yet, if you click on one of the items on the spotlight list (to get info on it) spotlight "touches" the document and poof it has todays date as its last viewed date. So that's totally useless and even dangerous if you are relying on it to figure out the most recent version of something you were using.
3) in the same vein, over time spotlight seems to touch all the resource or meta data forks creation dates. Or maybe not, I'm not sure. but the net effect is if you try to rsync it to another drive on a unix computer (using apple_double ) to preseve the meta data it ends up detecting that EVERY file has changed and recopies it, totally defeating the point of rsync.
4) you are supposed to be able to disable it from indexing a disk by using the "mdutil -i off "command. This only works some of the time. For example I had a two partition disk and while spotlight indexing is turned off on both, it still indexes one of them but not the other. (yes I deleted the old index). If you declare something Private it does not actually delete the index but simply does not report results for that folder. This is useless for stopping indexing on removable disks.
5) if you plug in a USB thumb driver it may decide to index it even if your just copying files off of it.
6) it's buggy. Often in Mail it fails to find content you know is present. Dont know if thats Mail, Spotlight or the API thats gummed.
7) It's insanely slow on a 1.2 GHZ powerboog or 800 Mhz G4 imac. Oddly it seems somewhat closer to reasonable on a G5
8) there's no simple way to have it default to find by name. in the finder to find by name you have to do the following steps. press command-F, pull down the find-by-kind and change it to find by name, then enter the name in the test field. Dont type slowly or it finds everthing with the first letter you type while you wait for five minutes. You can try to change the default from find-by-kind to find-by-name but most (but not all!) users find this change is not sticky and it reverts to find_by-kind. (and who would want find-by-kind to be the default!)
9) find by name is insanley slow compared to say "locate" in unix. it's not a lot faster than "find" in unix. Apparently they must not have indexed their DB on the name. what were they thinking?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I've had two hard crashes since I installed this. Hopefully it's just software and not that my iMac is dying.
Freakin' Amen. Spotlight is beta borked out the wazoo. it's user interface is missing obvious features the old find command had, like showing you the path to the file. (the finder's version of spotlight does but not the main spotlight widow). Duh!
I also got a DVD playback update and an iSync update. Here's hoping it fixes the annoying iSync menubar icon problem - the menubar icon only wants to sync .Mac accounts now (utterly useless imo), whereas in Panther it would sync my cell phone.
It would seem that my G5 no longer 'chirps' when moving around the dock, screensaver, etc. I had been using the 'Dis-allow nap' trick, but so far all seems to be well.
So, is Q2DX (or whatever ya want to call it) enabled with this update? Inquiring minds want to know...
The white zone is for loading and unloading only. If you need to load or unload go to the white zone. It's a way of life
Previously, I'd use the Option-Tab key command for activating my QuickSilver box. However, after I did the update, I realized the tab key now allows you to key through desktop icons, and, of course, option-tab does it backwards. If this was a previous functionality, it never got in my way before until now. :(
The hotfiles_evict thing is fucking killing me. If it weren't for the iBook, I would have had to do a clean install on the tower by now. If 10.4.2 doesn't fix it, you're gonna have (at least) one pissed off Apple Fanboy on your hands!!!1011!!
'"Do you hear me Jobs?!?!?" he cried, sloshing chardonnay(sp?) all about the joint.'
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Have we reached Teh Snappy(TM) yet?
Doesn't fix the missing framework for Activity Monitor.
Anyone know how to extract that framework from the install DVD? My Google-fu fails me today.
n/t
you had me at #!
AirPort
* With this update, logging out of Mac OS X automatically disconnects the computer from an AirPort network if it is using WPA Enterprise security settings (this does not affect WPA Personal WEP-secured networks).
* The AirPort menu extra displays more information when you enable a Software Access Point with this update installed.
* Adds support for AES encryption of WPA-PSK networks, which are supported by many wireless access points.
* The Try Again button behaves as expected when attempting to join a third-party, WEP-enabled wireless access point with this update.
* Improves reliability when associating with wireless networks after waking from sleep.
* Improves WPA2 wireless encryption support for AirPort Extreme cards.
Mail
* In Mail, if you retrieve and sort IMAP mail using multiple email clients, the counts of unread IMAP messages in mailboxes other than what's in your Inbox are more accurate with this update.
* Addresses an issue in which IMAP messages deleted in Mail could unexpectedly "reappear" after a few seconds.
* In some situations, a Mail message's attached graphic displayed as a small blue box with a question mark inside the message window, even though the attached file was just fine; this update addresses the issue.
* Mail no longer tries to print an HTML message's remote images if the "Display remote images in HTML messages" option is deselected--the message is printed without the graphics instead--after this update is installed.
* This update addresses an issue for Mail in which signatures with graphics were not appearing as expected.
iChat
* With this update, you can successfully send and receive AIM messages using iChat after changing network locations (without having to log out and back in)--from wireless to Ethernet, for example.
* If iChat is logged in to your AIM account in Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.4.1, logging in to the same account on a different computer disconnects the Tiger computer without warning--this update adds a preference choice to iChat to avoid this, if desired.
* iChat no longer states that the network is unavailable if you intentionally disconnect from the Internet using Internet Connect without first quitting iChat.
* Improves video framerate for iChat when certain kinds of background processes or applications are running.
* Resolves a situation in which iChat could incorrectly report "insufficient bandwidth to maintain conference," even though enough bandwidth was available.
Finder
* Addresses an issue in which the Finder could unexpectedly quit if Show Package Contents was chosen several times from the shortcut menu for the same package.
* The Finder slideshow feature should now always work as expected.
* If ACLs were enabled on an SMB volume, a Get Info window in the Finder wouldn't show the Details section when getting info on files stored on the volume--this update addresses the issue.
* Addresses an issue in which a supported burning device could unexpectedly be seen as "unsupported" by the Finder.
* The duration of MP3 files is accurately reported in Get Info windows in the Finder with this update.
Other applications
* With this update, many applications, including Safari, work better with proxy servers that require authentication.
* With this update, you can use Safari to log in to MyAccount on cingular.com.
* Safari pages scroll better with this update when scrolling with a scroll wheel (such as one on a third-party mouse or keyboard).
* Orange iCal calendars, with alarms that go off while iCal is not open, no longer change color after the alarm is snoozed.
* Addresses an issue in which Stickies.app notes could disappear unexpectedly if Stickies opens automatically during login (if it was set as a Login Item in Accounts preferences).
* Addresses an issue for Adobe Premiere 6.5 in which the application
Best regards, A.C.
The easiest way to work around hotfiles_evict is to free up some space on the drive. The big catch is that the freespace must have a contiguous block large enough to store the file which is being evicted from the hotfiles area.
I had the hotfiles_evict problem on a G4 tower at work. The boot drive was about 98% full. After moving some files onto an external FireWire drive I got down to about 90% full. The problem remained. I then moved more stuff until I got down to about 80% full.
Between the 90 and 80 mark I also disabled journalling on the volume. This, I think, is the easiest way to fix it. Disabling journalling also disables hotfiles and therefore the update daemon will no longer try to manage the hotfiles store.
I haven't seen the problem resurface yet. Note that this was a DP G4 and so update only ate 100% of one CPU (barely noticeable). What I did notice was the fact that my boot drive suddenly had ZERO freespace because the system.log grew to about 6 GB. Yes, I know, this actually exacerbates the problem.
I can only hope that 10.4.2 fixes the issue. I'll probably re-enable journaling and see what happens.
Also, speaking of drive freespace: There is apparently a known flaw in HFS+ with respect to contiguous freespace. When allocating new space for the catalog a 4 MB block of contiguous freespace is required. If you don't have a 4 MB block of contiguous freespace then apparently there is a bug whereby 4 MB will be allocated potentially overtop another portion of the catalog or overtop some file's data. Not good. Best advice from what I've gathered is to never let a volume be more than 80% full. Ever.
I hope that its something else but this is the first time that an update has slowed my computer down noticably.
I see a lot of people complaining on a lot of forums about this bug or that bug. Not that this isn't valid, but hoping that someone from the particular group at Apple will read your post is not a good way to go about getting your problem solved.
Step 1: Go to developer.apple.com and sign up for a free (as in beer) membership (or sign up for one of the expensive memberships if you want free software, hardware discounts, etc).
Step 2: Go to bugreporter.apple.com and fill out a report. You'll have to give up some info about your system and *detailed* info about the behavior, why its wrong, and what needs to be different. And if you can isolate the problem to a particular configuration, it'll help them fix the bug faster.
These enter Apple's internal bugtracking system. Some of your complaints are duplicates of existing ones, but if enough people bitch about a particular issue then there will be more pressure to fix it.
There is no step 3! (er, profit!)
The downside is that you'll likely never hear back from them. Even if the bug is solved, you'll never know until they release a new version. They may decide that the behavior is "works as intended" and ignore you. There is no way to follow the progress of your bug.
If you've experienced crashes since you installed the update, under what conditions did they happen? What were you doing at the time? What do you mean by "hard crashes"? Application crash? The Finder giving you a SPOD? Kernel panics? If it's kernel panics, what external hardware are you using? Did it happen when you plugged-in or unplugged a camera/printer/network cable?
Saying "I've had two hard crashes since I installed this" is neither informative nor useful in debugging the issue. I'd also recommend that you file a bug with Apple so they're aware of the issue. You might also get the feedback you want that'll help you decipher whether your iMac is dying or not.
My experience has been fairly decent, with Apple getting back to me within a couple days of reporting a kernel panic due to network switching from Airport to ethernet, and textual feedback on other issues.
Fair enough- but there are some serious bugs that still haven't been fixed, and are blatantly obvious. For example- add someone to your address book from Mail. It will flip their name around, putting "Last" in the "First" spot (YES, I'm aware of the 'sort/display list by last name' option, I'm talking about the edit pane).
Please help metamoderate.
I think the poster misunderstood. The linked page talks about the supposed 200 new features in 10.4, not bugs fixed in this update.
Little tip: Don't wait for it to finish building that list, move down to what you want immediately. Searching before you finish is a feature, not a bug, and it is brilliant. If they change it because of your post I'm going to have to find you and dunk you in onion juice or something.
Spotlight works so beautifully here that I have been telling people it is the single must-have feature with "Tiger" -- it is something that for the first time in years has actually changed the way I use the computer. For example, I don't usually even bother with the Applications folder anymore, I just hit Spotlight and type the name of the program. Works the same with any song I want to hear.
The Dashboard I could do without. Spotlight is a must-have, and I won't be using a operating system (or rather, desktop) again that doesn't have live searching.
When will people get that a floating point calculator is *always* going to have this kind of issue? Even the venerable HP 48 has floating point issues under certain circumstances.
If you need fallback to integer accuracy in all situations, if you absolutely *need* symbolic zero, rather than applying the significant figures with your brain, then use Maple or Mathematica or something like this. A desktop calculator app requires a brain to use. It's a dumb little application.
Bottom line: That's not a bug. It's a limitation of the app. The answer is not importantly wrong.
I make an app that uses rsync, and there are bugs galore in Apple's version. The "always recopies metadata" issue happens even for strictly local backups from HFS+ to HFS+. rsync will unexpectedly crash during the "building file list" phase if the backup source contains too many files.
I've reported both of these to Apple and both of them have been marked "duplicate" so they must be aware of the issue.
Try this:
Connect to a server and mount a share using AirPort as your network interface.
Go to the Airport menu in the menu bar and choose "Turn AirPort Off"
Enjoy Spinning Beach Ball of Death for extended period of time.
...why is this bug still there? Most annoying OS.X bug, of all times.
I just installed it on my 15" 1.25 Powerbook. No problems. Overall, it seems snappier - it's definitely swapping less. However, spotlight seems slower. It's taking forever to do a simple search that I routinely do, and have done w/ 10.4 and 10.4.1.
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
A couple of weeks ago I read somewhere that new Tiger retail boxes were going to contain 10.4.2 after it was released. However, I don't seem to find anything back on that. Was it just a rumour, or can I finally pick up Tiger, slot load the DVD and install 10.4.2 immediately within a couple of weeks....
The widget manager isn't much of a manager. All you can do is uncheck a widget to disable it. This basically just hides it from the widget dock. There is no way to move a widget from ~/Library/Widgets/ to /Library/Widgets/ and you can't delete widgets.
mbbac
use the --size-only flag with rsync
then again, every time I've used rsync on files that I've known are the same but with different timestamps, rsync happily checks the hashes on segments of the file and doesn't actually transfer all the data.
this is one of the big features of rsync, that it can do partial resumes. maybe you also aren't using the -P or --partial flags.
as for 7, 8, and 9: you're surprised that a G5 runs Spotlight faster than a G4? I'd assume that Spotlight takes advantage of altivec. there are tips on macosxhints.com for how to default to find by name. yes, Spotlight is new. it'll get better and if locate is faster at finding, then use locate until Spotlight catches up.
for me, it's fast enough on my G3 500.
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
Uh dude the apple site is not going to be slashdotted. No need to do this.
the photo bleaching bug in iPhoto is still there (and should be handled by an OS X update as opposed to an iphoto update because apparently it is a problem with corevideo and not iPhoto).
Still not auto-connecting to wireless networks as in 10.3.9
Safari is still slow and buggy compared to the panther version, and still occasionally beachballs permanently when too many windows are opened.
OS X is fantastic, but apple are dropping the ball on quality control, tiger is the buggiest OS X since 10.0
This bug has been around since NeXTStep. It is due to issue with lookupd, which has lead many engineers to call it lockupd instead. A real pain in the ass, and one that I have no idea why they refuse to fix.
I will admit Spotlight's interface is horrible. Terrible, horrible, etc. The find window forgets all my settings, the Spotlight window has virtually no options, the spotlight menu has items that shift around as you try to select them, etc. Pain in the ass.
That said, it IS quite fast! I have never waited more than 2-3 seconds for any search on my 1.25GHz Powerbook.
doesn't let you finish typing before it searches.
Actually, I enjoy this feature because I will often see what I am looking for before i finish typing and hence discontinue typing.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
At my home office and I use internet sharing to share my 17" powerbook's ethernet wire connection to a couple PCs in the office via airport/wifi. After installing 10.4.2, it's now broken--my vaio and my dell laptops can no longer connect to my powerbook's airport when encryption is on. Since security is an issue (and I can't have an unsecured network), I'm pretty much hosed (unless I want to go out and buy a wireless router). Sigh.
Andy
G-Force music visualization
Apple finally fixed one of my biggest complaints with this release: as of 10.4.2, OS X now supports AES encryption for WPA-PSK (a component of WPA2), eliminating the barrier to WPA2 adoption for Mac users. Among vendors whose equipment supports WPA-PSK with AES is Linksys, Belkin, Cisco, and doubtless many others.
Three cheers for Apple!
my pet finder bug, which has existed since 10.0 and has been reported with each major release to bugreport.apple.com is as follows. it has been marked as "duplicate" and thus closed, so i know it's been seen and i'm not the only one who's complained. but, as yet, it has not been resolved.
... "copy 9"
this is a long-standing "os X finder doesn't work like classic finder" issue, and while it's not a great hardship, it would be nice to see it fixed.
Summary:
files dragged from the finder into another application, or copied from place to place, or even file listings copied and pasted from the finder never retain the order in which they were diplayed in the finder.
Steps to Reproduce:
1 - select several files or folders in a finder window, in list mode, ordered by name. select edit->copy to copy the filenames to the clipboard.
2 - open a textedit document. paste the filenames into the document. the names will be in a different order from their positions in the finder, in a seemingly random new order.
Expected Results:
one would expect that the listing in the clipboard, and thus in the document, would reflect either a: the order in which they were selected (not the case) or b: the order in which they appear in the finder (also, not the case)
Actual Results:
for example, i've created several folders via duplication in the finder, named "copy 1"
in the finder, they appear in alphabetical order, 1-9. selecting these and copy/pasting the listing into an empty textedit document, results as such:
"copy 7
copy 4
copy 3
copy 8
copy 6
copy 5
copy 1
copy 2
copy 9"
clearly not alphabetical.
Regression:
none that i know of. selecting multiple files and opening them in their associated application opens them out of order. dragging multiple files from the finder into applications that accept dragged items imports/places them out of order, etc.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
And the update finally fixes my bright/dim buttons on my 15'' titanium. It's about time. I've been stuck on full brightness, draining my battery, since Tiger first came out.
Yes, but has Kerberized Login Window Support been fixed yet? Without support for Kerberos and OpenAFS, Tiger is still next to worthless for many universities.
Before the 10.4.2 patch I had a battery status icon and a clock in the upper right hand corner of the screen. After applying the patch, all I have is a spinning pinwheel where those items used to be. What gives? Anyone else have these items MIA?
This happened to me as well. It was my own fault, however. I'm running Tiger on a ridiculously slow old iBook, so I decided to get rid of any trace of Spotlight. I renamed the /System/CoreServices/Search.bundle folder, which is responsible for the Spotlight icon in the upper right of the screen. Apparently, the 10.4.2 update placed several updated files back in this folder, but not enough to constitute a valid bundle. So, SystemUIServer, the process responsible for the clock and the other things in that corner, choked when trying to read it. I just renamed the new Search.bundle to something else, and all is well.
If this wasn't your problem, you may want to try disabling any third-party MenuExtras, if you're running any.
Good luck.
Anyone else see this?
After running the 10.4.2 update on my PowerBook G4 15", the Dock keeps crashing, restarting, crashing, restarting, forever. I trashed the com.apple.dock.plist pref. No dock. Adds a new crash to the crashreporter log about every six seconds.
--dpb
/Oh, if only I had done nothing simply out of laziness!
On those of us suffering with this inconsitent spolight behaviour, When spolight goes off, the spinning beach ball startes and no amount of ESC key pressing seems to make it stop. Maybe it shortens the process but its not a panacea to the problem
I don't know that its a "quet" release. The news is everywhere. They just didn't make a big announcement. Apple patch fixes sucurity issues
Daily News http://newsblaze.com
"For example, I don't usually even bother with the Applications folder anymore, I just hit Spotlight and type the name of the program. Works the same with any song I want to hear."
If you like that, get Quicksilver. Same deal for launching, only much, much cleverer for dealing with things like instant google, dictionary, IMDB, whatever. Between Quicksilver and Spotlight, I don't even know where anything is on my drive now.
It was broken prior and by broken I mean it wouldn't run at all. Good of them to finally fix that.