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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
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.
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.
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
Apple does do delta updates.
Donate free food here
OS X uses quite a bit of OSS stuff. There's a good chance that a good portion of these bugs aren't theirs.
/usr/(s)bin, zip, gunzip, tar, efax, cron, ip6config, postfix, cups. No chance they had any bugs. They're good open source software.
.diff files as updates. If they're upgrading Apache 2 they have to recompile as a universal binary and send out that entire file.
http://httpd.apache.org/security/vulnerabilities_20.html
I see 3 vulnerabilities in Apache 2 right there.
My Leopard install is showing "OpenSSL 0.9.7l 28 Sep 2006" while my Debian machine is showing "OpenSSL 0.9.8g 19 Oct 2007". I imagine there might be a few bugs there, and it's late enough that it wouldn't have been released close enough to be included in 10.5.0.
Lets see in
Responding to you and the guy below, the reason that these bugs are 'so big' is that Apple isn't sending out a bunch of
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.
Here is a list
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.
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?
I had the same problem. You're not actually completing the installation. Download the fix from Apple's download page (http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/) and run the update manually.
I had a similar issue. I could duplicate it by the following
1. Turn on full screen visualization in iTunes
2. Stop the music (or otherwise have iTunes to nothing)
3. Allow the computer to start the screen saver (or turn off the monitor )
4. Wake up the screen
If will now be exited from the visualization but the dock will be missing. My guess is that starting a full screen app sets a flag to hide the dock and the method I describe bypasses setting it back.
I was able to get the dock back by going into full screen visualization and then exiting it.
(* trying it again right now to make sure I'm not a liar)
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.
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.
It is "developer seed" and "combo". It means, it is not end user version and in mac land, combo means "zero patch, all files updated since 10.5.0 with all language resources".
:)
Vista/XP does very aggressive patching on windows update. If a Mac general end user who kept his/her system up to date with software update sees 10.5.3 , it will be almost 5x smaller (or even less) than the 500 mb you see.
Also, "Developer Seeds" may have symbols, debug stuff implemented on them, they are intended for developers and never cleaned up like end user shipments. It is never a "lets download, copy the what's new and leak to some site" kind of file release
I don't want to get in too much details but the Apple's userbase are known to change icons, remove/add languages thanks to unique HFS+ filesystem. On Mac land, you can only trust to binaries to patch. It is another reason why Apple or any Mac software vendor can't ship pure patches except binary patchers. For example, people keep changing safari.app icon, it is trivial on OS X since only the resource portion is changed or they remove languages (not good on Leopard btw) from their applications.