Leopard: Oct. 26

[eric]

No sooner had I said I'd leave the apps aside, along comes:

Fusion v1.1 (Build 62573) with Leopard compatibility. Release notes. Nothing specific about Time Machine, so I guess they fixed the bugs with that caused problems with RC.

Also VMWare released a beta a new app called VMWare Importer which helps import Parallel virtual machines into Fusion. Nothing like a shot across the bow of your competitor.

Running v1.1 in Tiger still but it certainly cured two bugs I had: the frozen task bar in Unity and Caps Lock problem. But saving to my shared folder (mounted as a network drive) is suddently dog slow after the upgrade -- got some investing to do.

With that one down, I'm getting closer to installing Leopard for real....

----
Plus Mark/Space released some beta for Leopard, in my case the needed Missing Sync for Palm. See here.

[eric]

This didn't take long:

10.5.1 update

The what's new info.

[posecap]

I am running OSX.5.1 on iMac G5 with processor speed of 1.8 GHz, Bus speed of 600 MHz, RAM is 1 GHz on a 80 GHz HD with 15.5 GHz available. I have an external drive of 500 GHz with max speed of 400 Mb/ sec. The fan on my mac was running high and I shut down my 2 other users out of 9 altogether ( 7 logged out). I then checked my system profiler and it had 12 GHz available space on main drive( note it now has 15.5). I checked activity monitor and nothing was running, by this time main user was only on. Still the fan was running high, The Macjanitor had been run before this and had not did its course ( had to quit app). There is a sound in the background barely audible like an error notification on start-up and during regular usage in a short quick succession(6 Funk sounds) lasting 2 seconds. During the time that fan is running high my mouse is erratic and activity slows down. The fan will shut itself down after a while. This has not happened in Tiger and I am certain of that; are there similar occurrences out there?

[eric]

Paragon's NTFS for Mac OS X is now out of beta and Leopard compatibile. It's a commercial alternative to the open source MacFuse and NTFS-3G combo, for writing on NTFS volumes in OS X -- check system requirements for both.

Much in line with Jazzbo's remarks on the demise of NetInfo, Macworld posted an article, Analysis: the End of NetInfo, yesterday.

[eric]

Been awhile since I posted to this thread. But lots of updates that have come out recently for Leopard. The updates below completes the original list (and the later comments I added). Biggest block of my updating to Leopard is first on the list:


Adobe Acrobat Pro v8.1.2
I don't see it yet (at time of posting) on Adobe's CS update page but Adobe Acrobat Pro v8.1.2 is listed on Versiontracker and Macupdate. Looks like it finally fixes the broken Print to pdf in Leopard. Sweet!

Filemaker Pro (Advanced) and Filemaker Pro Server
There are Leopard fixes for the on the FM downloads page.

• FileMaker Pro 9.0v3 and FileMaker Pro 9.0v3 Advanced for Leopard
• FileMaker Server 9.0v3 and Server 9.0v3 Advanced for Leopard
• FileMaker Pro 8.5v2 and FileMaker Pro 8.5v2 Advanced

Superduper v2.5
Kaye's following/testing this update here.

Quark Interactive Designer v1.0.2

Mark/Space Products - Missing Sync
Missing Syncs for Palm, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and PSP have final releases for Leopard.

Diskwarrior v4.1
v4.1 is Leopard compatible and shipping. Note the following for those of us with v4.0:

Owners of DiskWarrior 4 version 4.0 will soon be able to download a free CD updater. When available, this free updater will allow you to create a new startup CD containing the updated DiskWarrior application. Please note that the new startup CD will start up the same set of Macs as your current DiskWarrior CD. Your new CD will not start up any Mac that your current DiskWarrior CD can not.

All Mac models meeting the system requirements for DiskWarrior except the new Mac Pro and Xserve models introduced on 01/08/2008 and the MacBook Air introduced on 01/15/2008 can be started from the CD.

This free CD updater will do the trick on my Macs. I don't have any of those new January Mac; for those models, you have to order an update CD.

TechTool Pro v4.6.1
Missed this one way back. Unlike DW, there is no downloadable update for this. You've got to order a DVD if you already own TTP v4.

[unclemac]

Running 10.5.2 on the home DA, with all available software updates. Need to test more, but everything is good so far.

[eric]

Running 10.5.2

...I'm trying to get there. I picked today to backup, wipe the HD on the MBP, then reinstall all apps fresh.

But my DSL has suddenly gone dog slow, so slow that SU can't connect. Makes downloading the 300+ combo problematic. May use the DA to download in the background, while I go about installing the other apps.

Uggh!

[rwm]

That has the Sonnett 1.2GHz in it right?

[unclemac]

Yup. Chugging along nicely. Some of the eye candy is a little slower in 10.5, but the finder is faster, Safari is faster....more good than bad. I turn off most of the eye candy anyway: dock animation, etc.

Don't think I would go too much slower for 10.5......somewhere around a 1.0 would be close to the bottom I would think. I think Apple's spec of about a 800 Mhz G4 is pretty good.

Still need to do some more testing for my more critical stuff, including boring things like Cisco VPN client and a couple different RDC tools.......MS RDC beta and CoRD, plus utilities like tinkertool and tinkertool system.

[rwm]

Unc,

I was not and am still not in a hurry to run Leopard but when I do you'd think my QS/867, 1.5 GB RAM, 10K 74GB Raptor+Seritek/1S2, 128MB VRAM GF Ti; would be decent or sluggish?

I was and still should save for the iMac. I am sending my DA and 1.6 Giga to Rick .. yes it's really in a box and see if he can salvage me a G4 Dual 1.6. Damn CPU runs in Brane's computer.

I was chugging along just fine for a year or more with a Dual 1.33GHz Giga (thanks biggles) then QS mobo blew both that was 2005. I should have kept it a little longer.

[unclemac]

Tuff call so far. I hope to have 10.5 rolled out to quite a few other machines in the coming weeks/months, so I expect to find where the bottom is as far as how fast a machine you need to get acceptable performance......meaning *about* as fast as 10.4.

The QS will be right there, but have max RAM and good (for its age) video will help. I am thinking it will run OK, and the good will out weigh the bad.......but a little soon to say that.

On older boxes I had some luck using third party tools to turn off the eye candy in 10.3 and 10.4 to get basic Finder/navigation speeds up a bit, so hopefully that is an option with 10.5 too.

[eric]

Made for more than a busy weekend upgrading the MBP to Leopard, espcially with my bandwidth worse than dial-up. I always forget how much longer it takes to reinstall the all the apps from scratch them update them. I should probably create disc images of some of these to speed up the reinstall.

I did a wipe and reinstall; and cherry-picked a few bits here and there to save time. It's almost there -- just a few apps to reinstall -- then I clone this install.

[rwm]

I did a wipe and reinstall; and cherry-picked a few bits here and there to save time. It's almost there -- just a few apps to reinstall -- then I clone this install.

I am working on a similar project. What are the pros / cons of copying or cloning?

A. Apples restore.
B. Super Duper.
C. A .dmg -- OK, I have created these but where do you keep them?
Other

[eric]

Randy,

Apple's restore worked at one point (probably 10.2-3), replacing CCC as my main cloner. But it failed me on several occasions under 10.4 producing unbootable clones. Based on kaye's SuperDuper! thread, I tried it out and have used that since, even producing my last two clones of 10.4.

I'm not sure that creating directly a dmg from a OS X partition, then trying to restore it will work. But you can use SuperDuper! to create a dmg during the clone; you should be able to clone that back but never tried myself. I haven't checked SD, but I know CCC will create a dmg that you can use with Apple's Restore -- so you can boot from the DVD, launch Disk Utiity and then restore from the created dmg. (But depends on whether Restore can at least function in that setting -- it used to.) Again haven't checked with SuperDuper! CCC had a specific option for that.

I used SuperDuper to create a dmg of the full 10.4.11 MBP HD, which is sitting on the DA. I also store them on FW drives. If you have the time, I think you can compress them as well to save space -- it takes time since you're basically re-creating another smaller disc image.

I also cloned to 2.5" portable FW drive without iTunes music to speed up the clone. Thereafter I wiped and reinstalled. If I had the space, I probably would have tried an Archive and Install, but it would have been too tight. Backup on the FW lets me grab app support folders, prefs, setting files, etc. for certain apps -- although I installed all the apps from scratch. It also let me boot back into 10.4 if I needed to, e.g. fetch the IPs of network printers at work. Apple changed the printing again, so you have to redo them in Leopard even if you upgrade.

Apple changed the permission structure yet again in Leopard. So part of my approach was to get a new /Users and home directory; I copied my docs from the FW into the new directory. That way the permissions are right.

[rwm]

eric, Thanks that clears up some questions and confirms others. SuperDuper has been working good for me. I have the time and enough space to test a lot of this. I need to learn it. I need to just jump in. I keep thinking I'll screw something up. But I have enough spare drives and/or space to cover my buns.

[eric]

Coming up on a week since I started the erasing of everything, and reinstalling from scratch. Always takes longer than I think. Some observations.

0. Purple Aurora
Start with the important things first. What's up with that purple aurora login background, default desktop? I had to change that pronto, and stumbled upon the fact that Leopard Server uses a Blue Aurora -- just had to use that instead. I've got nothing against the color purple (no pun intended with the book/movie), but blue has a long history with OS X.

1. Applications. Worth the wait for critical apps, with some seeing more than one update. Of course paid updates for some:

• Font Agent Pro (but v4 is much faster w/new useful features and GUI tinkering)
• Drive Genius
• TechTool Pro

Small list for a .1 upgrade for me. I'll probably only pay for the FAP upgrade, speed alone is worth it. Not sure about TTP or Drive Genius.

Nothing entirely broken. That said two glitches I've seen:

• Canon's Digital Photo Professional (used for Canon RAW processing) - slow loads, spits out errors in logs when it has focus (shades of Acrobat v6 in Tiger), potential to pollute the logs but it still works.
• USB Overdrive - can't see battery level with Mighty Mouse wireless or edit the name. Since Apple has improved its driver (for fast tracking), I can live without the heavy button custimizing. USBOverdrive driver seems to be a bit laggy anyway when clicking. So no more USB Overdrive for me.

2. Permissions
Apple did something new with the permissions for Leopard, which I haven't yet decided is good or bad.

From what I've gathered, you no longer have just the classic Unix: user, group, world. But for items, you can add additional users (who are non-owners) and groups from the GetInfo windows giving them different permissions, e.g. RWX.

Case in point, I had some problems with some Quarks extensions (Xpert Tools), set just as all other QXP Xtensions as:

Admin: rw
staff: r
world: r

Those extensions need to rw for whoever's using QXP. While troubleshooting this I found you can add additional users/groups to the permissions. So I added my non-Admin account giving it rw, while leaving the original permissions intact (Admin is still the owner). (You can press the little '+' button to add.) You can also select multiple items, and set the permissions like this for all -- I really can't remember if you could do this in Tiger.

But then curious me wanted to know what happens from the command line. For those items there an indication of 'custom permissions' (which I take it means non-standard Unix perms) there a '+'. Check out this screen shot where I put the Finder window (with 15 items selected), the 'Get Info' window for them, as a well as that directory listing in Terminal. Not sure what that '@' means next to the permissions. I probably need to read the man page to see if there are ways to access these additional users/groups from the command line.



This will take some getting used to but, it seems in some cases a rather quick and dirty fix for this type of permissions issue.

3. Overall
Performance-wise, things do seem faster or on a par with Tiger. I've encountered no major gotcha with 10.5.2. Although I didn't really care for setting up all my printers again -- along with 2 at home, I added 6 for work. (Bonjour would have made it much easier since all of those 6 are HP, but they (along with another 20 or so HP printers) weren't really set up for exploit Bonjour setup, i.e. giving useful Bonjour names so I knew where they were.)

Speaking of printers, Leopard no longer includes the driver for my Lexmark Optra E310. No biggie, I fetched a copy from my Tiger backup. Works just fine.

The Finder as unclemac mentioned does seem faster. In general I like the redesign of the Finder with exception of the monochromatic blue folder icons. When you stick those in the Dock; you can't make out any more which is which -- although they appear differently in the sidebar as seen above. 10.5.2 made some useful changes to folders in the Dock that I've got to get used to.

One other small thing but use feature with the new Finder is ejecting removals with more than one partition. Now you get a dialog box offering you the choice of ejecting all the volumes or just the single one you've selected.

Lots more exploring to do...

[unclemac]

FWIW, permissions in 10.5 suck. Apple decided to make sure that users don't own the folders in their home directory. Even as an admin, try deleting your ~/public or ~/movies folders.

I am still investigating to see what our options are, but it looks like they are doing this through ACLs which are invisible via the GetInfo window - and 99% of the third party tools out there like Batchmod. Things changed a bit between 10.5.1 and .2 so I need to look at it again.

Great.

I spent a bucket of time getting to know permissions back in 10.2. Jazzbo and others really helped; don't claim to know everything, but I have a very comfortable working knowledge of 10.2 to 10.4. But that all goes out the window with 10.5. Back to square one.

As an example, my work laptop is so jacked up that I have to log in as root to do some things that I am not allowed to do as admin. Moving data from a 10.4 machine to a 10.5 machine can be particularly painful. And repairing permissions does nothing to help.

So......you've all been warned.

[eric]

More on permissions from the command line. Just check the man page and it has notes about the '@' and '+':

If the -l option is given, the following information is displayed for each file: file mode, number of links, owner name, group name, number of bytes in the file, abbreviated month, day-of-month file was last modified, hour file last modified, minute file last modified, and the pathname. In addition, for each directory whose contents are displayed, the total number of 512-byte blocks used by the files in the directory is displayed on a line by itself, immediately before the information for the files in the directory. If the file or directory has extended attributes, the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by a '@' character. Otherwise, if the file or directory has extended security information, the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by a '+' character.

I understand the '+' and hence 'extended security information', which means added users/groups with special rwx permissions.

Not sure what 'extended attributes' are. Hmm....

[eric]

FWIW, permissions in 10.5 suck. Apple decided to make sure that users don't own the folders in their home directory. Even as an admin, try deleting your ~/public or ~/movies folders.

I also noticed that Apple changed the permissions setup of the Home directories again. I think at 10.3 or maybe 10.4, they were:

user: username rwx
group: username rwx (rwx I think)
everyone: nothing

Essentially Apple had 10.4 (at least) create a group identical to user, those you usually saw on the Home directory and folders within (except for Public and sites).

Now with Leopard that group is no longer there, all you get in 'Get Info' is:

user: username rwx
everyone: nothing

That group (the same as your username) isn't created at all anymore from what I can tell. Looks like non-Admins are back to being members of 'staff'.

Duh, I piped the output of ls -la:

drwxr-xr-x+ 26 eric staff 884 Feb 27 08:59 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root admin 204 Feb 17 19:37 ..
-rw-r--r--@ 1 eric staff 12292 Feb 27 01:18 .DS_Store
drwx------ 17 eric staff 578 Feb 27 01:18 .Trash
drwx------+ 27 eric staff 918 Feb 26 19:53 Desktop
drwx------+ 41 eric staff 1394 Feb 23 16:45 Documents
drwx------+ 32 eric staff 1088 Feb 27 01:23 Downloads
drwx------+ 38 eric staff 1292 Feb 22 08:27 Library
drwx------+ 3 eric staff 102 Feb 17 17:49 Movies
drwx------+ 3 eric staff 102 Feb 17 17:49 Music
drwx------+ 26 eric staff 884 Feb 18 13:35 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x+ 6 eric staff 204 Feb 18 16:46 Public
drwxr-xr-x+ 5 eric staff 170 Feb 17 17:49 Sites

Check that out all those folder have the '+' indicating some 'custom' access.

I performed a wipe and install of Leopard. So I created my user also from scratch, leaving permissions and the home directory as is -- this to insure nothing was whacked with the permissions. Then manually copied my files over from a backup, sticking them in the appropriate folders.

I see that ~/Public and ~/Movies are owned by me, but there's an OS "override" that prevents me from deleting them. Hmm... rm -rf? Or that get defeated too?

[unclemac]

Your findings match mine for POSIX perms......plus they added some ACLs. AFAIK the ACLs always take precendent over POSIX perms if both are enabled. Once you kill or modify ACLs you can actually manage your folders again.

Tuff part is finding a tool that can let a users manage ACLs with a GUI tool. WorkgroupManager does this for 10.4 Server. So far the only tool I have found that can do this with 10.5 is TinkerTool System.

I have been digging through ACL tweaks so long I have forgotten the default 10.5 settings. I know, write it down first genius!

Most users may not notice, but big changes.

At work we use (up through 10.4 anyway....) a bit of a sledgehammer approach that is simple and clear, though it butchers Apple's model for User perms.