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Mac OS X 10.5.3 To Fix Over 200 Bugs, Coming Soon
An anonymous reader writes "MacScoop reports that 'Apple has seeded several builds of its Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.3 update to developers during the past few weeks and just seeded yet another one numbered "9D34" earlier today.' The update fixes over two hundred bugs, weighs almost half a gigabyte and should be available soon."
OS X 10.5 is, in many ways, a big step up from 10.4, but it was clearly rushed to market. I've been using it since the official release, and it's felt like a beta OS for all of that time - random pauses for a few seconds, crashes every month or so, occasionally taking two or three attempts to resume from suspend and so on. It's really hard to tell whether the improvements with 10.5 outnumber the regressions at this stage, and so this is a very welcome update (although, really, this should have been 10.5.0 and the previous ones should have been betas). In general, these don't contain new features, although occasionally they will, but they will be minor improvements, while the big changes come in the major releases (the 10 isn't really part of the version number, it's part of the name).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Will they fix Spaces? Make X11 usable?
Once upon a time, you could buy an Apple product and expect it to work. Then the common wisdom became "as long as you don't get revision A, it should be okay". Now I'm to the point where I'm not even expecting the fucking fourth revision to work properly.
Thats some patch! Nearly 500Mb - With 200 bug fixes thats 2Mb or so a bug.. Them bugs are big 'uns! Surely that figure is inaccurate?
Perhaps it will roll out piecewise like Vista SP1 and take only 65Mb to download on your average machine.
Just to contrast the "great, because 10.5 has been so buggy for me" posts:
I've been using 10.5 on two different machines for quite some time now, and I have had not had very many problems at all, and none since the 10.5.2 update.
I know I'm not the only one with this bug, but Apple still hasn't responded to this problem. My software update *always* lists the "Aluminium Keyboard 1.0 Update" as being ready for install, no matter how many times I install the update. It's very annoying.
MABASPLOOM!
It's more like a *nix version increase than an MS service pack... sort of. Apple uses a lot of open source BSD stuff... so when they update all that stuff it has whatever the open source crowd has done, plus whatever Apple decides to do with it. I recall some new features in the 10.4 succession... so I guess 10.5.3 might contain some new features but I wouldn't hope for anything earth shattering (like ZFS). I truly wish they would fix the Bluetooth audio headphone thing but I suppose it isn't priority.
People still have dial up? I expect that Apple would ship disks on request but I wouldn't expect them for free. I've never had Apple refuse a reasonable service request but I've never asked for that. Also I'll bet you can download a PPC or X86 (or a version for a specific sort of Mac like my cube) which is substantially smaller. That universal binary thing is really, really nice (my 8 core mac pro can boot from the same hard drive as my Quad PPC G5 and my PPC G4 Cube) but it makes things twice as large.
I would say that sane Mac users will ignore this news and wait until the software update app on their Mac alerts them. Really smart users will postpone that for while to see if there are a rash of catastrophes caused by the update⦠even if there is a bug fix or update they are interested in.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Which 200 bugs are they talking about? Why do they know about 200 bugs? Does that mean 200 users of Mac OS X 10.5.3 have been screwed, if each bug is sufficiently obscure? What is the average user footprint of each of these ten score bugs? Isn't progress wonderful? Now we use statistics and databases to decide how many bugs HAVE to be flushed before users balk and refuse to buy. In the old days, bugs were personally embarassing to the poor sap who perpetrated them during development. I guess we have Bill Gates to thank for "Good Enough" programming, 'ey? What a champ!
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
i dunno how stable time machine is supposed to be, but it certainly isnt on the imacs we got at school for our art lab. of course, the fact that art students are the ones who keep managing to mess things up with it might have a great deal more to say about the problem...
I recently upgraded my MacBook to 10.5, and have been regretting it. I only use some of the new features (don't really care about Time Machine, one of the biggies), and a lot of stuff that used to Just Work (wireless networking) has become problematic.
The biggest problem I had, oddly, was with downloading software updates - the downloads would mysteriously stop after a few seconds or minutes (and not due to loss of network connectivity - a Windows box on the same network was able to download stuff rock solid, at the same time), and would never resume. Had to do some kind of Mac voodoo (Restore Permissions, or something like that) to fix it. So I'm a little concerned about even being ABLE to download a 500 MB software update, due to bugs in the software...
JRjr
Here is a compiled list of fixes in 10.5.3.
The biggest improvement with 10.5 is that Spotlight now actually works. In 10.4 it was so slow that I could generally find files faster without it. With 10.5 it is fast enough to be useful.
I keep my dock on the left side, attached to the top-left corner, and the 10.5 dock is about as nice as the 10.4 one, just different. Most of the visual 'improvements' make things worse. The transparent menu bar is hideous with most background colours. The larger drop shadows are okay, but they don't really make up for the fact that the new style gives less of a visual clue as to which window is raised (I've typed things in the wrong window a lot more often since upgrading). There are lots of little regressions, particularly in the text system (CoreText is definitely not ready for prime time) and especially with Rosetta.
The new Preview is very nice - I now use it exclusively, where I used to use 3 different apps for PDFs, and Quick Look and Coverflow are both nice for browsing the filesystem, although I don't use them very often. Support for ODF in TextEdit is definitely useful for small docs, since OO.o takes forever to launch.
I do, however, find I am using fewer and fewer Mac-only apps, so I am not sure if my next computer will be a Mac.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Having used Apple machines much of the time since 1987, I have long ago stopped rushing to the newest OS version. It's almost always best to wait six months to a year after a new point release, it will usually take that long to be really ready. I dislike that, but my experience with FreeBSD, Debian, and even Windows tells me that's pretty much the way they all do it.
Caveat Utilitor
http://www.innermindmedia.com/dock_doctor_app.html
http://leoparddocks.com/
hey kids, get your durn iPods off my lawn!
Some recent discussion on audio in Leopard:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/tag/leopard/
Now, note in particular that Digidesign's struggles aren't limited to Leopard (see, for example "Digidesign and M-Audio Drivers Fail to Keep Pace with Vista, Leopard, and XP SP3") -- I personally think Digi as a company has a problem. But they're not the only vendor mentioning audio issues in 10.5.2, and there are others like MOTU who haven't been explicitly complaining but have had product release delays (DP 6 was supposed to be out Q2).
Tweet, tweet.
The breakdown is very simple: Generation.Major_release.Minor_release, with build numbers appended to that. Windows does an almost identical pattern Win2k (5.0), WinXP (5.2), etc. MS's numbering is non-sequential, but it's not really any different. Hell, Windows 7.0 is actually being called Windows 7 for now.
'OS X' is a brand in its own right, and one Apple has spent a lot of resources and effort building. The '10' in the version number that matches the 'X' in the name isn't cast in stone, and to claim that part of the version number is part of the brand is misleading. The stupid Mac-people meme of "when will we hear about OS XI?" skips right past the far more likely case that there will NEVER be an OS XI. They will either stick with OS X as a brand and move right on to OS X 11.0, or they'll come up with something entirely new when the time comes.
No, the previous post was correct. The 10 in Mac OS X 10.5.3 is most definately NOT equivalent to the 5/6/7 in Windows. Think of it in terms of the names. Windows 5 = XP, Windows 6 = Vista, Windows 7 = ...
Mac:
10.3 = Panther, 10.4 = Tiger, 10.5 = Leopard.
The fact that the name changes should be a big indicator for you that this is a major release, not just a 'point' release.
If you don't like the marketting way of looking at things, think of it from the software management side of things - APIs don't change for point releases, but they do for major releases. In which case, the change from 10.4 to 10.5 is most definately a major release.
Sheesh, I don't know why we still have to explain this to people. Maybe I should have just responded with a great big fat 'TROLL'
If I already have a Terminal window in space 2 and want to create another one, this fact doesn't help because Spaces keeps track of the space the front-most window of an application is in. So even if there is a Terminal window in space 2 but a Terminal window in space 1 is more "front-most" than the one in space 2, then when I Command-Tab to switch to Terminal, I'll be brought back to space 1. Again, this isn't what I wanted.
The current behavior of Spaces whereby it auto-switches spaces or changes what the front-most app is (presumably to be "helpful"), IMHO, makes Spaces broken and unusable. Spaces should never automatically switch spaces nor change the front-most app no matter what (or at least have a Preference to make this the case).
I've been an Apple fan-boy since my Apple ][plus, but Leopard is the first version of OS X that I thought wasn't very compelling (and kind of broken) on release.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
You mean a software update that masks nail clippers?
I know at least one of the major fixes is an 802.1X implementation that actually works without having to install the Internet Connect App. It's finally going to correctly support 802.1X PEAP w/WEP and WPA, something the previous version of 10.5 did horribly, if at all. Installing the Internet Connect app from 10.4 was a useful workaround, but seemed like a pretty stupid thing to have to do, especially for an apple product. But, as along as 10.5.3 works, my clients should be hapy (if a bit annoyed that it took so long).
Clearly I forgot to equip my +5 Codpiece of Karma.
I don't know if this will be helpful, but I found I liked the Leopard dock better after running:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock
It gets rid of the 3D look and gives the same look that the dock takes when you move it to the side of the screen.
Posting as Anonymous Coward because I've already modded this thread and don't want to waste the mod points, but I also want to be helpful.
You can quite easily configure static IPv6 addresses via System Preferences. It's not all that hard. Here's how:
That wasn't so hard, now was it?
Windows Server 2003 is a different line of product, as is Mac OS X server on the Apple side. Why bring it up? As for XP/Windows 2000, How many apps written for XP didn't run under 2000. I personally never came across any. That's because there were hardly any changes to the API, and the few major changes were backported to Windows 2000 anyway.
On the other hand, just try running software written for Leopard on Tiger. Under the bonnet, these two version of Mac OS X are massively different, with the introduction of Core Animation, the Time Machine APIs, the Objective C 2.0 runtime, with it's garbage collector, the Scripting Bridge so that Ruby and Python programmers get to be first class citizens. There really wasn't a corresponding change between Windows 2000 and XP.
Thank Jobs, they fixed this:
Text-to-Speech and Hysterical voice no longer causes hang
Now my business can finally make the switch to 10.5.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
And as an anecdotal rebuttal to all that, I've personally updated two machines from Panther -> Tiger -> Leopard and my family at large has done Jaguar -> Panther -> Tiger -> Leopard on G5s, PowerBooks, MBs, MBPs and MacPros, using a wide range of software (we're all photography buffs, one of us is a designer, two of us are developers, one MacPro is still running Tiger). Backup, upgrade. If you have problems, do a clean install. But so far we've done just fine with upgrades, thanks.
Hmmm, I hope this update works with my Thinkpad T60p Hackintosh! I will of course play it safe and let some other sucker^H^H^H^H^H^H brave soul try it on their box first...
If you set the OpenFirmware password, then clients connecting via FireWire are blocked from doing direct memory access.
The major system version number.
For example, in 10.4.12, this would be the decimal value 10. Available in Mac OS X v10.3 and later.
Declared in Gestalt.h
gestaltSystemVersionMinor
The minor system version number. For example, in 10.4.12, this would be the decimal value 4.
Available in Mac OS X v10.3 and later.
Declared in Gestalt.h
gestaltSystemVersionBugFix
The bug fix version number. For example, in 10.4.12, this would be the decimal value 12.
Available in Mac OS X v10.3 and later.
Declared in Gestalt.h From http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Reference/Gestalt_Manager/Reference/reference.html.
Are you kidding? This is an unsupported interface tweak-- the command line is just a quick way to make the change. There are several ways to make this change, including downloading a freeware utility that lets you tweak your system.
Personally, I think this is *exactly* the way things like this should be handled. Give people an interface for making the most common tweaks, and expose the more complicated tweaks in such a way that 3rd party developers can come up with other ways to handle it. That way, you're not cluttering your default interface with every little setting, but you're also not preventing anyone from changing the setting. If the tweak is popular, then there will probably be a few different programs that will make the tweak for you.
Anyway, the system is entirely functional for "normal users" without this tweak. And if someone really wanted to make this change, all they have to do is copy/paste the command into their terminal window and hit enter.
Of course, I don't recommend that people run random commands they see on the internet in terminal without understanding what they do. Otherwise you'll be in deep the first time you see "cd /;sudo rm -rf *" posted online.
The biggest improvements and changes in Leopard are all under the hood which lead to the marketing problem of "How do we sell it?" Time Machine was the answer, but it's hardly the best new feature.
Beneath the skin you have real 64-bit support and resolution independence in the system libraries, plus actual POSIX compliance. These are huge things that obviously took a lot of work and the kinks are still being ironed out.
Unfortunately, the benefits of all this forward looking support won't be realized until developers write applications to take advantage of it. Leopard was a necessary step to get us to a not too distant future of 32GBs of memory and 300 DPI monitors on the desktop and in our laptops.