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Leopard Upgraders Getting "Blue Screen of Death"
Z80xxc! writes "Some Mac users upgrading to Apple's new Leopard operating system are encountering long delays on reboot — an experience they liken to the Windows 'Blue Screen of Death.' While some of those upgrading were able to access their computer after waiting for as long as several hours, others were forced to do a complete reinstall. Some suspect that a framework called 'Application Enhancer' by Unsanity LLC may be causing the problem, but there has been no official word from Apple at this point."
There have been plenty of issues with archive and install as well. Just backup your home directory to that lovely new HD you got for time machine, and then unplug it and Erase and Install Leopard. I had no issues.
:P
/Library/Preference Panes/Application Enhancer.prefpane /Library/Frameworks/Application Enhancer.framework /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Application Enhancer.bundle /Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist
Then restore the data from the backup drive, erase the backup drive and then you can turn on time machine.
See, those years of doing Windows upgrades finally paid off for something
Or, if you actually get the blue screen:
1. Reboot into single-user mode (hold Cmd-S while booting machine)
2. Follow the directions OSX gives you when you get to the prompt (I think these were them - just type the two commands it tells you to):
fsck -fy /
3. Remove the following files:
rm -rf
rm -rf
rm -rf
rm -rf
4. Exit, to continue booting normally
exit
Via: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1195031&tstart=0
There are three options on any Mac OS install
- Plain old upgrade. Just lays down the new OS on top of the old one
- Archive and install. Takes a backup of your current stuff, lays down a clean OS, and recovers your stuff from the backup it made
- Erase and install. Erases the disk/partition, and installs the OS.
(2) or (3) are the best option. I use (3) because my home directory is on a different disk to my boot disk, and I did that on purpose so I could do nice clean installs. (2) works well too though.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Unsanity is officially listed by the company not to worik with 10.5
http://www.wire-heads.com/istrip/index.php?strip_id=26
I have done this on two Macs so far, my PowerBook G4 @1.5 GHz and a G5 iMac @2.1 GHz Both have Application Enhancer as well as Fruit Menu, WindowShade X and other Unsanity products installed. They still show up in System Preferences, but are not functioning. I'm hoping for updates soon. However, their presence in my systems had no ill effect on my Leopard upgrades.
On macs apps are self contained entities (normally) thus archiving means moving all the apps out of the application folder and into another folder. You can then at your leisure drag them back one by one.
/usr/local/bin or libs or /share/man. So restoring those takes a bit more work. But on the otherhand those are exactly the kind of Cruft you want to blow out between major system updates. So archive and install is the way to go in previous updates
It also moves all your preference settings and fonts to another folder, and cleans out the startup items list. (fonts and preferences are the only two things that normally leak beyond the app container (there's a few other exceptions for special apps, but as a rule installing an app does not barf all over your computer with DLLs and Registry hooks. On macs, the OS polls the App in Applications folder for its capabilities and files it likes to open, so the app does not need to modify a registry. as a result unistalls are normally as simple as dragging the app out of the application folder.
So after an archive and install you drag back the things you want to keep. The only hassle is sometimes you need to look for the associated preference setting which is where most apps store their activation key.
A few non apple apps behave linux like and shove things into
Rumor was that apple worked hard to make the non-archive and install mode (update) smart enough to remove all the bad crap and leave the okay crap. Apparently not!
But if it is APE then well then that's kinda understandable its the singlemost invasive kernel mod of all.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Anyone experiencing this should try holding shift while booting. Any additional frameworks, kexts, and whatever will be left out and the system will boot cleanly. If that works, then the offending software should show up in a log and can be identified and removed.
There is no need to reinstall when something can be removed easily with a safe boot. Too bad Apple doesn't talk up safe booting more so people will know it is there.
Any time there is a major OS version, it's foolhardy to 'Upgrade' in that there is no way for the vendor (in this case Apple) to possibly test for each potential configuration. While it's true that this may make the move to a new platform base take longer (with needed software reinstallation) it's the best way to ensure a smooth transition, and also assist the end-user AND the software vendors in question to bug squash.
It's easy to point fingers, and the upgrade process should in truth be discontinued altogether (imco) and rather provide utilities that will help a user migrate personal settings and preferences to a new build via a back-up utility of some type. To be fair, Apple does a GREAT job by providing the archive and install method which goes half-way but does not provide the opportunity to 'archive and clean install' which would be the ideal case.
For myself, I can't wait to step into the time machine, and also get the new features available in the OS X Server product.
if I claimed I was emperor just because some watery tart lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!
Command-v during the boot chime (or "sudo nvram boot-args=-v" to set it permanently). This shows a lot of "scary" unixy output, but it's great for diagnosing a boot problem.
:).
Of course, I'm a cli guy
It isn't. A kernel panic is the Mac OS X equivalent of a BSOD. If the machine takes hours to launch after an upgrade, or doesn't launch at all, it's a different kind of failure. I speak from first-hand experience, as this happened to me. Thankfully I keep good daily backups.
APE is a third party product that is not a part of OS X.
However, recently Logitech has started using APE as a part of their driver package for their mice and keyboards, in effect installing something known to cause headaches behind people's backs.
Therefore the many people that use Logitech products may have APE without explicitly having installed it.
Either way, I can hardly see how Apple is at fault.
But don't you have to then reinstall all of your apps? That's like Win98 logic.
Why would he - this is a Mac, not Windows.Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
If you had Linux apps that worked the way APE does, it would bring down the entire system, too. The only reason you don't is that Linux doesn't have a community of people who long for the olden days of Mac OS 9. I'll explain.
Back in Mac OS 9, apps didn't have protected memory, and thus you could write extensions to the OS that quite literally rewrote parts of applications and the OS itself. Mac OS X uses a more proper model like Linux. However, some people still want to do those sorts of mods to the OS. The result was that the Unsanity folks created APE. APE basically sits down at the linker level and starts an additional thread with its own code running inside the address space of the target application. This thread then loads plug-ins that modify the behavior of the app.
You should immediately see the problem with this. You have a bunch of people who don't have anything to do with the author of an application writing code that mass-modifies dozens of applications, libraries, etc., essentially doing binary patching on the running OS. There's no other phrase to describe this other than mind-bogglingly dangerous. In a biological comparison, it's like rewriting the genetic code of the entire planet using only a single person as a template---as soon as you hit a person with slightly different biology, the patch goes completely wrong. Similarly, when APE tries to operate on new versions of the OS, new versions of applications, new versions of frameworks and libraries, etc., it tends to result in cutting a path of destruction rather than enhancing anything.
What blows my mind is that APE isn't smart enough to check the OS version and NOT LOAD. It is truly unbelievable. How hard is it to say if [ "$(sw_vers -productVersion | sed -E 's/([0-9]+\.[0-9]+)\..*/\1/')" != "10.4" ] ; then syslog -s "unknown OS version." ; exit 0; fi? Every OS release, APE causes some sort of major problem for a lot of users. Every OS release, people just keep coming back and reinstalling it even after seeing the fallout. I just don't get it. It's like Stockholm Syndrome or something....
IMHO, the Unsanity team should be taken out and beaten with wet noodles until the mere sight of a Chinese restaurant causes them to have nightmares for a year.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Unsanity's Application Enhancer uses the debugger framework to access and modify an application's memory space. Since Leopard randomizes memory, one might expect that trouble would ensue.
The Unsanity hacks have been a source of trouble for many users for several years. Unsanity has vehemently denied that their products are the trouble, and by a twisted piece of logic, it is the application itself which is misbehaving when things go wrong. It's not hard to find heated discussions of these things on message boards and sites like versiontracker.com and macupgrade.com. The source of the disagreements might be related to how long a person leaves an application open, with the probability of mayhem increasing with time since launch. These remarks relate to pre-Leopard versions of the OS; it seems that Unsanity is finally caught with their pants down and no place to crap.
Safer to do the following given the spaces in the paths (or escape the spaces in the path using \)...
3. Remove the following files:
rm -rf "/Library/Preference Panes/Application Enhancer.prefpane"
rm -rf "/Library/Frameworks/Application Enhancer.framework"
rm -rf "/System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Application Enhancer.bundle"
rm -rf "/Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist"
I'm not aware of anything quite as straightforward as copying files to an external hard drive and copying them back, but with Ubuntu it goes something like this:
Then on the new system: Then Ubuntu goes back to the repositories and grabs everything again.You meant why doesn't APE do this?
SInt32 vers = 0;
err = Gestalt(gestaltSystemVersion, &vers);
if (err or (vers >= 0x1050))
{
return paramErr;
}
(which I just took from the APE source code).
Ummm... no. Please don't flame until you know what the heck you are talking about.
/Applications folder - you can drag to your desktop if you want, and it will work the same way.
When you drag an application from a disk image to anywhere on the system, Apple's launch services register the application, based on the configuration within the application bundle. It has nothing to do with the
I've never found an app that I couldn't easily scoop up and move to a new machine.
/Applications and drag to other computer /Library/Application Support and ~/Library/Application Support /Library/StartupItems and ~/Library/StartupItems for any related startup items
1) Grab application or directory off
2) Grab plists from ~/Library/Preferences
3) Copy any related resources from
4) Check in
About 90% of applications are fully migrated after step 1)
This doesn't cover drivers or other wierdness like PreferencePanes, but those are usually stand alone files that can be copied over.
That's hardly a quick/easy operation, which is what was implied by GP.
What you wrote above, I can apply to Windows just about as well.
I can usually copy the Program's directory, fish out the major Registry entries, and for some of the more complicated programs fish out their DLLs pretty easily.
The only time I really run into trouble is with certain pieces of software that actually fingerprint the machine during install
" Wow, what a terrible idea. It's like WinXP logic for font installing- Explorer is consistent _except_ for the font folder which calls the font register-er when you drop files into it. Finder is consistent _except_ for the applications folder which installs system services and processes scripts every time you drop a dmg into it. Hm. "
/Applications directory, no special installation magic goes on when you drag an application from one disk to another. The application itself is basically a special kind of folder which contains all of the resources and even extra libraries required for it to function, this avoids the need to use an installer at all in most cases because most of the resources reqired for the application are in the application.
If you're going to criticize something it helps if you have the slightest clue what you're talking about. Try actually using a Mac sometime, you might be pleasantly surprised.
There's nothing special about the
By contrast, Windows applications have a tendency to sprawl over the hard drive, copying things into shared system-wide resource directories because that is how a library is registered in the windows world. The windows start menu is used to cut through what would otherwise be a very cluttered place, the "\Program Files" directory.
On the Mac the equivalent, "/Applications" contains the actual application in it's entirety. Again; in contrast linking applications into the Start Menu is one of the many functions of an installer in Windows. Without installers you wouldn't have any idea where the application went and would have to navigate the troubled waters of "\Program Files" alone.
The other magic usually handled by installers in Windows happens when you first load an application, at which point it exchanges information with the OS, the OS from that point on knows where on the disk the application is so that even if you move it around the filesystem hierarchy it will still be able to find it, it also exchanges information about what mimetypes the app would like to be associated with so that it can show up in the "open with..." list for certain file types and declare itself able to handle any types of files it might create.
If you need to register system services, then you need an application installer or a monkey willing to do it by hand (a user, for example). In that case mac applications install like Windows ones, by using an installer package.
God FUCKING DAMN IT.
I just found a tool called "ape_install" in the resources of the logitech prefpane
Rosyna, FUCK YOU and logitech both.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There's no suspicion about it; that's exactly what's causing the problem. Application Enhancer is an input manager, and input managers are no longer supported in Leopard. People installing it knew the risks they were taking when they installed it on Tiger. Instructions have already been posted online on how to remove Application Enhancer from the command-line.
Sorry, there's no big "BSOD" error in Leopard's install. It's a hacky piece of software people shouldn't have been installing in the first place.
"Sufferin' succotash."
14 upgrades, 4 reformats and 2 archive and install. 0 problems.
Thats 10 G5's and 4 Mac Pro's with upgrades.
Thats 4 MacBook Pros reformats.
Thats 2 Powerbooks with archive and install.
You can mod me any way you like, but it wont change the success I've had with Leopard....Awesome.
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
Per Unsanity's web page, the current version checks. Previous versions don't. They say "Please accept our sincere apologies for all the trouble that was caused. We have underestimated the number of people running "outdated" versions of our software."
http://www.unsanity.org/archives/haxies/leopard.php
Personally, I think APE and the Unsanity haxies are %$^%$ and I stay as far away from them as I can!
This sig has exceed its monthly bandwidth allotment.
But you're wrong.
/windows/system32 folder mixed in with hundreds of others with short useless names (or worse yet, in other places). Sometimes, there are things in folders in /Program Files/Common Files (or worse yet, in a "common" folder elsewhere). In many cases, the DLLs have to be registered (again, often done by the installer).
/Library or ~/Library (or at worst /System/Library). If they are things that hook into the system somehow (codecs, fonts, screensavers, etc.) they will be in those folders instead, but that makes sense too, and they truly can be installed for just one user or everyone depending on which Library folder they go in (as opposed to the Windows "install for just me" which only changes who sees the start menu icon). In any case, there is no "registering" of any kind, so as long as you put these things in the right places, OS X will see them. Again, it's been like this for decades (fonts go in the Fonts folder, extensions in the Extensions folder, etc... and they don't need to be registered in any way like on Windows)
/Applications folder to whatever you want, and almost everything would still work*, but try that with /Program Files on Windows. You would lose the ability to double click files to open them, lose custom icons for different file types, start menu shortcuts would break, uninstallers wouldn't work, etc.
On Windows, most file type associations are done by installers. Occasionally the app itself does them when it's launched (many people object to that unless it's optional though). Either way, they are stored in the registry as a path to the EXE. If you move it, the link breaks. If you copy the app to a new system, the link doesn't exist.
On a Mac, as soon as the system sees the app (regardless of where it is), you can open file types that belong to it with a double click. It's been like that for decades, so yes, in this regard, it is easier on a Mac.
As for the other support files, it's a little more complicated. On Windows, you have DLLs that are sometimes in the app's folder, but are often in the
On a Mac, they may be in a few places too, but usually they are pretty obvious. They are often found in appropriately named folders either the Application Support or Preferences folders in either
So, again, it's a little easier.
On a Mac, you could even rename the
Personally, I don't think OS X outshines Windows in most cases, but these are the kinds of things it does do very well.
*Everything except Apple's own Software Updates, although most people would consider this a bug. Apps and file type associations would still work though.