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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."
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...
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.
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"
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.
It really IS catching up with Vista!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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
Hippocracy? Is that the system of government where horses are the ruling class?
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
What makes this all the more ironic is that in the new CoverFlow Finder, PCs on the network are displayed with a Blue Screen of Death... teeeheee!
I hate monopolies, and I am posting from my Apple computer, which uses Apple's OSX, and has an Apple mouse, keyboard, and monitor. I connect wirelessly through my Apple router, email with my Apple webmail account. I'm also listening to music on my Apple iPod, which I purchased from my Apple iTunes account.
Damn that evil Microsoft monopoly!!! Always forcing everyone to use their products!!
Just remember, if windows got taken down by a third party app, not only would you be screaming and shouting...
Not under circumstances like this, we wouldn't. Some of Unsanity's programs are pretty invasive little things that fuck around with the OS in ways that Apple doesn't support. From their site:
So yeah, if you have even a vague understanding of what this product does, it shouldn't be any surprise that it could cause problems if you threw it on a new/unknown version of the operating system. This isn't just a "3rd party application". It's not like if Windows crashed when you installed Firefox (which Microsoft would get criticized for), but more like if Windows crashed when you tried to use an obscure and invasive 3rd party WindowsXP hack on Windows Vista (which Microsoft would not get criticized for).
And it's not even clear that OSX itself crashed (as in a kernel panic). For as few details are available, it could just be that Finder or the installer crashed, which wouldn't be surprising if APE is screwing around with those applications' memory space.
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.
Too bad Apple doesn't talk up safe booting more so people will know it is there.
Too bad Apple doesn't do the user-friendly thing, which is to offer users "safe mode" when the previous boot failed. That's what both Linux and Windows do, and it's the right thing to do (well, even better would be detecting and disabling broken extensions, but I guess that's too hard for any of them).
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.
Unfortunately for Apple, it's OS competitor has a much better track record in the quality of new releases.
You're right: Ubuntu kicks Apple's ass not just in terms of included functionality, graphics, and price, but also in terms of smooth upgrades.
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.
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.I've noticed that is the latest groupthink to make the rounds. it's a statement about as useful as "i know I'll get modded down for this..." which inevitably gets modded up.
There are a lot of people on slashdot (and I guess in the world in general) who seem to enjoy being the victim of some massive conspiracy, rather than perhaps recognizing that when lots of people disagree with them it really is just a lot of people thinking they're wrong.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
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.
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).
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.