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."

Comments

Archive and install

[sagefire.org]

Archive and install!

It's the safest way to upgrade. Yes, it's less convenient, but way better than finding out that some 3rd party tweak is not compatible the hard way...

Re:Archive and install

[anagama]

Oddly, when I tried to upgrade today, I got no option for that. My only option was to reformat and and install. I'd already backed everything up, but I didn't want to deal with a new install if I didn't have to -- I decided to just do a test install on an old firewire ipod.

Anyway, I'm a bit non-plussed with Leopard. The "stacks" thing is really lame. Used to be you could put a folder in the same spot and get a menu -- nice way to navigate through applications, particularly for those who don't like a giant slab of apps but prefer to have them organized by type, e.g., networking, graphics, games, etc. The stacks are only one level deep -- if you click on a folder, it just opens in Finder. This is very non-ideal.

The real deal killer is X11 though -- totally borked. If you launch it from the applications/utilities folder, it doesn't even launch. You have launch it from it's actual location under /usr -- and even then it makes two icons in the dock and if you have the right hardware (like my 1st gen macbook), the cursor turns yellow inside apps which essentially makes it invisible against a white background. There was a fix for this for Tiger so I tried it out. After that, X11 wouldn't even launch a terminal. Way lame.

Re:jesus h christ

[Anonymous Coward]

Using APE is an insanity of the first order anyway. Dealing with Unsanity's refusal to help is what made me dump all their products.

Me: "Hi APE is causing crashes on my mac"
Unsanity: "No it's not, it can't. This is why.... "
Me: "OK, that makes sense thanks"

two weeks later

Me: "Hi, APE definitely is causing crashes on my mac"
Unsanity: "No, it can't be, because... "
Me: "I just did a fresh install. it survived multiple reboots in its completely standard configuration. I installed APE, now X, Y and Z all crash"
Unsanity: "Well it's not APE, because APE does ... "
Me: "I removed APE, and instantly it's working again"
Unsanity: "Well it can't be APE, because ... "
Me: "Fuck you"

Mod parent up

[phillymjs]

This is hardly the first time Unsanity's stuff has caused problems with a new version of OS X. If people are too damned dumb to uninstall their unsupported-hack add-ons before upgrading, that's their problem, not Apple's.

And no matter how much better OS X is than Windows w/r/t the "it just works" aspect, things can and do still go wrong sometimes. A little pre-upgrade basic system maintenance never hurts (at least repair permissions and verify/repair the target disk from Disk Utility on the Leopard CD), and neither does making a bootable clone of the system in case you have to revert.

~Philly

Re:Mod parent up

[GarfBond]

Not everyone knows about APE. I, for one, found APE on my system after wondering why my logins were so damned slow. Hint: update_prebinding was being run on every user logon because that was the only workaround that Unsanity decided to use for some retarded bug of theirs. Nevermind that this slows user logon down by about 5 minutes each time! However, I had never installed APE ever in my life, so how did it get there?

Logitech mouse/keyboard drivers install them for you, without asking or telling you! It's not entirely the user that's to blame - even a reasonably careful user won't notice surreptitious installs like this. Logitech's method of bundling it is vaguely like spyware, I'd say.

Re:Java 6 NOT included in Leopard

[ValentineMSmith]

It would be wonderful if it worked that way. However, Apple has decided that they (not Sun) will be the source of Java for Mac boxes. This moderately irritates me in that I'm a Java developer, and would like to be able to test with Java 6. So, to do so, I have to keep a copy of Parallels and Ubuntu around.

Why Linux doesn't have this problem.

[argent]

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.

I've done that as well. I mean, binary patching the actual OS, not just applications running in userland. Sometimes you gotta do it.

If you knew what GNU libc does to try and avoid having to make people rebuild applications when upgrading libraries, you'd run screaming. They have code in there to look for libraries at runtime and dynamically load different variants of other libraries depending on what you're using and what you have installed. The glibc team has people who do nothing but look for cases where they have to adapt for different libraries and different kernel versions.

The reason that you don't have more of a problem on Linux is that there's no central Steve Jobs for Linux who dictates the way the GUI works, so if you don't like the way Enlightenment or fvwm or Windowmaker behaves, you can change it. The downside of this is that there's no single framework you can modify or replace to make global changes. There used to be, back when everyone used Athena Widgets, and you could replace libXaw with libXaw95 to get a Windows 95 look, or with libXawSTeP to get a NeXTSTeP look. Now, instead, you get Battluin GUIs between the Gnome and KDE yobbos.

And there's all kinds of Windows hacks that do similar stuff to APE, from development tools to simple user interface enhancements. And, yes, they can cause problems and break in new versions of the OS.

What Unsanity has done is to create a framework that makes this kind of thing relatively safe compared to having everyone build their own. Unfortunately since they're not at Apple or someone that Apple is willing to support (because they are undoing the things that The Steve has decreed) there's an unhealthy passive-aggressive relationship between Apple and Unsanity that doesn't exist between (say) Debian and the glibc team.

And, yes, they should be disabling themselves on upgrade. And Apple should look at the things that people are using Haxies for and make the things they are trying to get rid of optional.

The other thing is, on Windows people simply don't put their trust in having an upgrade work. They do clean installs. And they wait on upgrading Windows until this kind of thing gets shaken out.

unplug external USB drives....

[vaporland]

Unplug any external USB hard drives, especially if they USED to have a system and now only contain data, but you never reformatted them, and only erased files via the Trash.

Try rebooting afterwards, and you'll start up just fine. People really waited HOURS?!? Wow, what a bunch of Geniurds....

It's the same boot issue that occurs when a windows machine has USB set to boot ahead of the CD ROM or HD, and you put an empty keychain in the USB slot - it hangs.

I had this problem, as soon as I rebooted with no USB HD, things went fine. This is, of course, on an Intel Mac...

On a Core (non-2) Duo, the wireless networking driver for Boot Camp will recognize your Airport Extreme 802.11g as an 802.11n, but since it isn't, you will not have wireless connectivity.

This will show up if you have a Core (non-2) Duo and an Airport Extreme with 802.11n support, since the Airport device always broadcasts the 802.11n signal.

Re:APE is *not* a kernel mod.

[Ilgaz]

my bad. APE acts like a kernel mod which is why I think of it as one. It lets you do things you "shouldn't" be able to do without a kernel mod by playing some funky games. That is where its safety comes from. It is user mode, uses Input Manager functionality to do things which normally would require kernel mods or plain old binary hacking.

Apple removed the functionality which makes APE work by the reason of one anonymous idiot coding a horribly coded Trojan horse abusing Input Managers.

I don't know if US law supports it but Unsanity should sue Macfixit or a similar FUD spreading company for $1. Let them prove APE does anything bad to OS scientifically or pay the $1.

As I am preparing for Leopard on this system, I uninstalled APE (Unsanity recommends not doing it) and see how "evil" "performance killing", "system crashing" thing APE was. No, the idiotically coded Applications still crash with trivial reasons, System still boots in exact time which it booted before and I am staring at Mr. Jobs favorite widget graphics knowing the fact that I will stare at them for a long time until Unsanity codes shapeshifter for leopard.

My FreeBSD/Debian/Slackware using nerd friends and system admins happily changes how their desktop looks but on a $190 (family license) OS, I am not allowed. I can't even change mouse pointer which I did back on Windows 95 and even X11 on AIX allows!

Apple invited thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who aren't happy with their desktop look to binary hack their OS resource files. That is what they did instead of removing InputManagers from home directory or secure them.