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OS X Operating Systems Businesses Apple

Apple Releases OS X 10.4.2 Update 182

Posted by timothy from the here's-more-appley-stuff dept.
kenthorvath was one of many readers to note that "Apple has quietly released an update for OS X Tiger. New features include a widget manager for dashboard and some 200 bug fixes and enhancements."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Apple Releases OS X 10.4.2 Update More

Apple Releases OS X 10.4.2 Update

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  • no zlib patch (Score:5, Informative)

    by inio ( 26835 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2005 @10:14PM (#13049858) Homepage
    Incase anyone's wondering, this update doesn't seem to include a patch to zlib to fix the buffer overflow in it.

    • need to fix spolight too (Score:5, Informative)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2005 @10:53PM (#13050098)
      While I love being able to text search in content, spotlight is so horribly beta I'm almost at the point of disabling it. The thing keeping me from that is that I'd lose my mail search.

      The problems with spolight are well known now but I'll recite them:

      1) doesn't let you finish typing before it searches. Yeah that was supposed to be a feature, but apparently it wont halt and discard the first search as you try to type. If you are a slow typist and qimply type the letter followed by a pause before typing "uicktime", for example, you have to wait while it finds every document witha Q in it. You cant stop it. No hacker has yet reporeted finding where they store the default time delay so you can adjust it.

      2) When you sort by date you can only sort by last access date not creation date. Worse yet, if you click on one of the items on the spotlight list (to get info on it) spotlight "touches" the document and poof it has todays date as its last viewed date. So that's totally useless and even dangerous if you are relying on it to figure out the most recent version of something you were using.

      3) in the same vein, over time spotlight seems to touch all the resource or meta data forks creation dates. Or maybe not, I'm not sure. but the net effect is if you try to rsync it to another drive on a unix computer (using apple_double ) to preseve the meta data it ends up detecting that EVERY file has changed and recopies it, totally defeating the point of rsync.

      4) you are supposed to be able to disable it from indexing a disk by using the "mdutil -i off "command. This only works some of the time. For example I had a two partition disk and while spotlight indexing is turned off on both, it still indexes one of them but not the other. (yes I deleted the old index). If you declare something Private it does not actually delete the index but simply does not report results for that folder. This is useless for stopping indexing on removable disks.

      5) if you plug in a USB thumb driver it may decide to index it even if your just copying files off of it.

      6) it's buggy. Often in Mail it fails to find content you know is present. Dont know if thats Mail, Spotlight or the API thats gummed.

      7) It's insanely slow on a 1.2 GHZ powerboog or 800 Mhz G4 imac. Oddly it seems somewhat closer to reasonable on a G5

      8) there's no simple way to have it default to find by name. in the finder to find by name you have to do the following steps. press command-F, pull down the find-by-kind and change it to find by name, then enter the name in the test field. Dont type slowly or it finds everthing with the first letter you type while you wait for five minutes. You can try to change the default from find-by-kind to find-by-name but most (but not all!) users find this change is not sticky and it reverts to find_by-kind. (and who would want find-by-kind to be the default!)

      9) find by name is insanley slow compared to say "locate" in unix. it's not a lot faster than "find" in unix. Apparently they must not have indexed their DB on the name. what were they thinking?

      • Re:need to fix spolight too (Score:4, Informative)

        by jeffehobbs ( 419930 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2005 @11:14PM (#13050200) Homepage
        Amen to this:

        doesn't let you finish typing before it searches.

        That is annoying. And let me also add that, conversely, Dashboard would be far more efficient and useful if it updated itself before I press the damn Dashboard hotkey. As it is, the way Dashboard works now:

        1) Hit the Dashboard hotkey.
        2) Wait for all the various pieces of info to come in via the network. Keep waiting. Isn't this convenient?
        3) See the info you want(ed), in roughly the same time it would have taken you to open up Safari and click a bookmark.

        But the way Dashboard should work, in my opinion:

        1) Dashboard gets that info for you in the background. (Dashboard occasionally updates that info, too).
        2) Hitting the Dashboard hotkey shows the info you want, so you can read it in a split-second, and get on with your life.

        ~jeff

        • doesn't let you finish typing before it searches.

          That is annoying.

          Oddly enough, this doesn't bother me at all. It might be that I'm using a faster Mac (or have a smaller hard disk to search.) You are, however, absolutely right about Dashboard widgets. Even if you don't want this to be default behavior (to reload a bunch of stuff), refreshing in the background should definitely be an option.

          Some widgets I use a ton (e.g., Wikipedia) don't really have a problem like this, but most of the re

        • If Dashboard were to do that, you'd see occasional drops in system speed. These would vary from barely noticable to "what happened to my system"

          When you activate it, all the processes page into memory (if they're not already there) and run their little JavaScripts. That means that there's a lot of memory/disk swapping going on, plus the network activity inherent in grabbing this sort of data.

          If you're doing some intensive processing, that may cause disk thrashing as you're paging Dashboard widgets in whil
          • Why not have Dashboard run during idle time, like so many other apps?

            To me, it seems that Apple has developed a fetish for having things happen EXACTLY when I don't want them to. I still have no honkin' clue why I have to wait for the 3 external FireWire hard drives I have attatched to my computer to spin up (one by one, not all at once!) before the computer will eject my USB key, display an open or save panel, etc.

            Granted, I haven't bought Tiger yet, maybe that particular asininity has been fixed.
        • I believe the Now Playing (Tivo) widget updates in the background depending on how many minutes you set it before you update, or you can have it update only when you call Dashboard.

          Yes, that wait for all the other widgets is really annoying. Can't they set it to a high nice and then have them update?

        • doesn't let you finish typing before it searches.

          Actually, I enjoy this feature because I will often see what I am looking for before i finish typing and hence discontinue typing.

      • Re:need to fix spolight too (Score:5, Informative)

        by drdink ( 77 ) * <smkelly+slashdot@zombie.org> on Tuesday July 12, 2005 @11:35PM (#13050304) Homepage
        Have you reported these issues to Bugreporter [apple.com]? Even if you think somebody else did, the duplicate count will make it more obvious that people are annoyed by these things.
        • I don't feel the bugreporter is the right way to go: Currently, ADC Membership is required, limiting its appeal to developers (even if it's free). Additionaly, everybody that hates a bug has to enter it again, because the bug lands in a black hole, massively undercutting user efficiency. It would be much better if Apple listed every incoming bug and would let users vote on them. But no, tiny Apple is afraid of its own bugs and won't share with the world :-(
        • Apple has relaxed their QA goals so much in their needless drive for questionable and poorly thought out features (Spotlight, Dashboard, etc.) that the mountain of bugs that now exist in OS X is too much for anyone not on their payroll to submit, particularly when their online bug reporter is buggy itself, totally a black box, and frankly bugs languish there for months and years with zero change and no feedback other than emails that go out around the time of major point updates stating "we think it might n
          • Well... I both agree and disagree with you. Tiger has some neat features. I love dashboard (and I use it hourly). Smartfolders made a huge difference for me. However, it does feel sorta beta in a lot of ways. There is a kind of incompetence in the Mail app that just annoys the hell out of me. The smart folders, for example. I have 10 smart folders running, all of which work except for 1.
            That 1 is empty, unless:
            a) I have just launched mail or
            b) I click "edit smart folder" then press ok.
            Crazy.

            I haven't encou
      • I don't want to sound like Trolly McTrollpants, but I just don't see the Spotlight speed problems.

        I've got an iBook 1.2GHz, standard 60GB drive and 784MB RAM, and it's always been fast and responsive for me. My system has about 300,000 files on it, which seems like a reasonable number.

        I keep hearing isolated stories like this and wondering if it's more universal or just scattered anecdotes.
        • Well I've heard of people it works well for and am wondering if those are isolated incidents or just scattered anecdotes. :-) I have three data points: 1) 800Mhz Imac G4 2) 1.2 Ghz powerbook G4 3) dual 800 Mhz G4 on all of them its painfully slow. All of these have outboard 200+gig firewire drives.
          • Sounds like a common thread in your case - external drives. I haven't used SpotLight when my external 80GB drive has been connected (and wouldn't expect much difference then - it's full of large media files)

            Well, good luck with it. There's not much else I can do but hope Apple improve performance on it.

            • Re:need to fix spolight too (Score:4, Insightful)

              by MagerValp ( 246718 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @03:27AM (#13051186) Homepage
              Nope, I have the exact same problem here, and no external drives. If I (try to) search for "quicktime" it'll start chugging after "qu", and after about 30 seconds, and a bunch of useless documents containting "qu" in the list, it'll register the rest of the query. Clearly it should at least wait for 1-2 seconds of inactivity (and/or the enter key) before it starts to search.

              Search results are also more or less useless, the fuzzy content search rarely returns what I expect, and often it misses content that I know is there. Something predictable like "name contains" is much more useful, but as others have noted it's impossible to change the default.

              But what really blows is that they removed the file search functionality from Sherlock. It did exactly what I needed, and it did it fast.
              • Okay. I'm on the iBook now.

                I go to Spotlight, type in 'quicktime' slowly and it searches for me instantly. It takes a few seconds to completely refine the list after I type the 'e' but it's not bad.

                How many files do you have on your hard drive? Disk utilities shows I have 284,830 files spread over 52,415 folders, in 52.7GB of 55.8GB (about 94% full).

                Spotlight is fast for me. I can't believe that my iBook is somehow magical (after 16 months it no longer sleeps when the lid is closed...) but I also can't b
              • I'm posting this on a mini with an admittedly low number of files but it comes up with a complete list of file containing 'e' in about a third of a second.

                I also have an MDD G4 2x1.0GHz which is currently running headless due to a combination of a borked nVidia card and idiotic cow-orkers who sent back the replacement card I'd ordered whilst on holiday because... I was on holiday. Anyway, mdfind from the command line takes exactly 1 minute to list every file containing 'e' form the 0.5TB of data on that
            • No, it's gotta be something weird. I'm on a 1.8 dualie w/ lots of space on FW drives, and spotlight zips.

              I typed in "p." I let it go for about 5 seconds, at which point it had found about 25000 documents, displaying about 15 of the top hits. I then typed in "enny" to make "penny" and after about half a second it continued on to search for the more specific term.

              It may be the processors, but I think something else is up. I'm in your boat -- never had a problem with it, and I think it performs great,

          • My wife and I have an 800 Mhz iBook, a 900 Mhz iBook, and a dual 1.8 Ghz (revised) G5. On every system spotlight zips along quite effectively and I notice no significant slowdown. Our G5 is houses our massive store of information (tons of music, movies, photos, etc) and spotlight is invaluable. The only time it is an annoyance is when I have 'put hard disks to sleep when possible' set and our firewire drive connected. Then every spotlight search will have to wait for the external drive to spin up before com
      • The problems with spolight are well known now but I'll recite them: 1) doesn't let you finish typing before it searches...apparently it wont halt and discard the first search as you try to type...You cant stop it.
        Press the ESC key.
      • Re 3:

        This is mainly a problem with the new resource-fork friendly rsync (I assume you're using -E). It can't/doesn't compare the resource forks, and so simply just recopies all files that include them. It's sort of the safer action (makes certain what you're syncing to matches) but, as you've found, gets quite irritating in certain instances (for example, it continually recopies my 2GB VPC image). Here's hoping they fix this in a new version.
      • Amen to that, I find Spotlight slow, buggy, and a giant leap backwards from good old Sherlock. I was really hoping that they would fix the worst bugs in 10.4.2 (delay before it starts to search, making it possible to search by name contains as default), but Spotlight fixes are mysteriously absent from the release notes.

        Sherlock used to find my files in a fraction of a second. Spotlight often takes almost 30 seconds before it's done, defaults to a fuzzy search method that doesn't return useful hits, doesn't

      • No problems here (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Nice2Cats ( 557310 )
        While I love being able to text search in content, spotlight is so horribly beta I'm almost at the point of disabling it.

        Little tip: Don't wait for it to finish building that list, move down to what you want immediately. Searching before you finish is a feature, not a bug, and it is brilliant. If they change it because of your post I'm going to have to find you and dunk you in onion juice or something.

        Spotlight works so beautifully here that I have been telling people it is the single must-have featur

        • For example, I don't usually even bother with the Applications folder anymore, I just hit Spotlight and type the name of the program.

          I do that in linux too.. except instead of using spotlight, I just use a terminal. :)
      • My experience has been different here.

        > doesn't let you finish typing before it searches. Yeah that was
        > supposed to be a feature, but apparently it wont halt and discard
        > the first search as you try to type. If you are a slow typist and
        > qimply type the letter followed by a pause before typing
        > "uicktime", for example, you have to wait while it finds every
        > document witha Q in it.

        My computer is fine here. Right now, I'm trying this out:

        1. command+space. Boom! Spotlight opens
        2. Press q.
        • I second this experience.

          I am running Tiger on an 867Mhz Powerbook with 640MB RAM. And I have none of the problems that some people here are seemingly very upset and vocal about.

          Spotlight instantly begins refining the search every time I press a new key, and new results start coming back instantly. The entire search is completed in less than three seconds.

          I suggest that those experiencing the issues with Spotlight that have been described here run all the basic housekeeping (repair permissions blah
      • use the --size-only flag with rsync

        then again, every time I've used rsync on files that I've known are the same but with different timestamps, rsync happily checks the hashes on segments of the file and doesn't actually transfer all the data.

        this is one of the big features of rsync, that it can do partial resumes. maybe you also aren't using the -P or --partial flags.

        as for 7, 8, and 9: you're surprised that a G5 runs Spotlight faster than a G4? I'd assume that Spotlight takes advantage of altivec. the
      • doesn't let you finish typing before it searches

        Laserlight [versiontracker.com] solves that issue.

  • Just got it. The Widgets manager was very need after my collection included some widgets that I did not really want.
    • In Widget Manager, you remove a widget by clicking on a red circle with a white minus sign in it. In the iTunes music store shopping cart, you remove a song by clicking on a grey circle with an X in it. I had no idea what the red circle meant-- it didn't even have a tooltip. Where's the consistency?
    • The widget manager is... a widget?

      OK, I wans't expecting that. It looks quite nice though.

      No problems here, but it didn't fix that iPhoto bug.

    • Re:Just got it (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Seumas ( 6865 ) * on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @01:14AM (#13050735)
      The widget manager would be neat if I hadn't already turned my dashboard off.

      Dashboard itself takes about 20MB of memory. Each widget takes at least 20MB of memory. Most people I've seen have at least a half dozen widgets going (if nothing else, the default calendar widget, a notes widget, a weather widget, calculator, countdown...)

      Six widgets and dashboard will take up a good 150mb of RAM right there. I'll save my 150mb of ram and use stickies, weather.com, regular calendar and the OSX calculator instead, thanks.

      Dashboard could be potentially useful, but not if it keeps sucking up the resources it currently needs. And not if all people keep making for dashboard are widgets to replicate what OSX already has readily available (why would I use a stickies/notes feature in dashboard for 20MB ram when I could use the builtin OSX stickies at 9MB?).
      • I am seeing significantly reduced memory usage for Widgets under 10.4.2. The largest memory usage is 11.8 Mb (for Weather) and the smallest is 5.9 Mb (for IP Subnet Calculator) for a total of 58 Mb for my 7 Widgets. An average of 8 Mb per Widget isn't a perfect world but it's significantly better than the average of 25 Mb that you cite.

        On the whole, 10.4.2 seems much better with memory. Since the update I have several hundred more meg of free memory.

        On a side note, I don't know why anyone would use Dash

  • Server Update Notes (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 12, 2005 @10:23PM (#13049910)
    Enhancements

    The following items are some of the enhancements and improvements in Mac OS X Server 10.4.2 Update:

    Mail Services

    Upgrades SpamAssassin and ClamAV to include additional support for TNEF (winmail.dat) files and new detection mechanisms for JPEG-based exploits.
    servermgrd

    Addresses an issue in which Product License Keys may be reported as invalid due to case sensitivity.
    Workgroup Manager

    Addresses issues with the creation of custom home directories specified within a subdirectory of a sharepoint.
    Addresses compatibility issues for administration of a 10.3.9 server from a 10.4 system with 10.4 admin tools.
    Xgrid Admin

    Addresses an issue which prevented the Xgrid Admin application from securely connecting to controllers that required Kerberos authentication.
    Addresses an issue which may have prevented controllers from sending files to agents.
    Improvements made for batch jobs sent through the command line.
    Open Directory

    Addresses an issue that prevents systems from connecting to Windows 2003 Active Directory deployments.
    Addresses an issue in which systems stop authenticating through Active Directory.
    Addresses an issue in which Active Directory users who are set as computer administrators may not get admin access to a computer.
    Addresses an issue that prevents Mobile Accounts from authenticating with Active Directory.
    Addresses an issue where the DirectoryService process may stop after waking from sleep.
    Addresses an issue in which newly-created accounts may not be able to authenticate or appear in user lists.
    Addresses an issue where Password Server may stop working, causing authentications to fail when replicated Password Servers are used.
    Addresses an issue where kerberos authentications may fail after importing a large number of users (60,000 or more).
    Apple File Services

    Addresses an issue where Apple File Services may pause indefinitely after experiencing heavy loads.
    Addresses an issue which prevented Apple File Services from setting inherited permissions in nested folders within shared volumes.
    Addresses an issue where multiple automounts from a single client would incorrectly count against 10-client Server licenses.
    Disk Imaging

    Addresses an issue which may have caused failure reports when used with large volumes.
    Managed Users

    Addresses an issue which prevented some Login Window management options from being honored.
    NFS

    Addresses issues which may have caused the mountd process to crash when NFS is used to host HFS volumes.
    SMB

    Improves handling of workgroup and file names when connecting and copying to shared SMB volumes.
    Addresses issues causing -36 connection failures when connecting to SMB shared volumes with an old keychain password.
    Addresses an issue that may cause kernel panics on multiple Xsan systems when unmounting Xsan volumes.

  • According to new benchmarks (Score:5, Funny)

    by HomerJ ( 11142 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2005 @10:24PM (#13049914)
    it is 34% more snappy, and applicaions open with 21% less DBs(dock bounces) than 10.4.1

    • Re:According to new benchmarks (Score:4, Informative)

      by elbobo ( 28495 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2005 @11:27PM (#13050267)
      I cringe at saying it, but I *actually am* finding this one snappier. Or to be more precise, I'm finding it less memory hungry.

      Widgets seem to be using up considerably less memory and running more smoothly than previously, which in turn frees up more memory for other tasks and has reduced general swapping.
      • See I am going to wait a few days and see if Apple releases any fixes for it before installing it. But a person I work with installed it and I really like the look of the Widget manager. I didn't get a chance to use his system to find out if the speed increased or anything, but in a few days I probally will.
      • Seconded. I am finding my system doing a lot less thrashing since the update. The main culprit was Safari, which seems to have dropped from using about 120MB to using about 40-60 in normal use.

        I can also report that Quartz 2D Extreme seems to be a lot closer to being production-ready. I was finding that it resulted in some image corruption (lost or incorrectly placed characters, and incorrect Z-ordering) when displaying complex PDFs, but this appears to have been fixed in the latest release.

    • Have we reached Teh Snappy(TM) yet?

  • Quietly? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Raypeso ( 851771 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2005 @10:28PM (#13049941)
    Everytime there is a post about an apple update it always says "Quietly released". What the hell do you want Apple to do? Major newspaper headlines? Have Steve Jobs land a helicopter in your front yard to tell you the news? Christ, it's a minor update.

    • Tune in tonight (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      For the Apple Computer 10.4.2 Release Extravaganza! Fireworks! Fun! Special guest host David Hasslehoff will wrestle a real live grizzly bear for a corned beef sandwich! See it all on FOX!
    • Never thought of that... maybe they want Software Update to be remotely launched by Apple, and balloon widgets pop up all over the desktop and a big banner to fly across the screen saying, "Upgrade now or Ives will not love you!"
    • They are low key about some of their updates though, I was online tonight with my apple laptop and the software updater didnt flag it. Also, didnt see it prominently displayed on the Apple startup page as of 8 PM EDT.
      http://www.joseandkris.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
      What I do when I'm not on slashdot
    • It's quiet because it didn't appear on the frontpage of Slashdot.

      Oh, wait...

  • Crash crash crash (Score:2, Interesting)

    by alms ( 871430 )
    I've had two hard crashes since I installed this. Hopefully it's just software and not that my iMac is dying.
    • If you've experienced crashes since you installed the update, under what conditions did they happen? What were you doing at the time? What do you mean by "hard crashes"? Application crash? The Finder giving you a SPOD? Kernel panics? If it's kernel panics, what external hardware are you using? Did it happen when you plugged-in or unplugged a camera/printer/network cable?

      Saying "I've had two hard crashes since I installed this" is neither informative nor useful in debugging the issue. I'd also recom
    • Funny, I read your comment and told myself it wouldn't do the same to me since I'm so gentle with my mac. Went to update and oops, it crashed like yours :-)

      However, I'll give details about my experience: iBook G4 first gen. No hack or special software installed, exception made of the great screen panning doctor. It was a hard crash on the first reboot. The second reboot went smoothly and everything looks fine and no harm done (?).

      No need to send a bug report, on reboot, my happy mac now-10.4.2 asked me if

  • I also got a DVD playback update and an iSync update. Here's hoping it fixes the annoying iSync menubar icon problem - the menubar icon only wants to sync .Mac accounts now (utterly useless imo), whereas in Panther it would sync my cell phone.
    • That's not a bug, and it's not something that's likely to be fixed. The menu extra in question is now known as the .Mac Sync menu extra, not iSync. iSync is now essentially an application, as opposed to a service.

      The aforementioned menu extra will, indeed, sync your cell phone via iSync (which now slaves to .Mac Sync) as long as the iSync application is open. Apple's help files even recommend having iSync open at login, but check the spiffy "Hide" option in the Login Items pane of the Accounts system pref
  • It would seem that my G5 no longer 'chirps' when moving around the dock, screensaver, etc. I had been using the 'Dis-allow nap' trick, but so far all seems to be well.
  • So, is Q2DX (or whatever ya want to call it) enabled with this update? Inquiring minds want to know...
    • No. It won't make it into 10.4 ever. Apple simply couldn't make it work in time. You can enable it with the Quartz Debug developer tool, but be warned - they disabled it for a reason.
      • You're right. It won't be added to 10.4 . I wouldn't like to run 10.4 either. I'd much rather be using 10.4.X where X equals $CURRENT . I'm sure 10.4.X will have Q2DX sooner or later. Even if it's LATER, it will be fine. Why? Because it works now. If it's fixed later, YAY, otherwise, it still works as is.
    • I don't know if it's enabled by default. You can manually enable it by editing a plist file and rebooting, which I did. 10.4.2 seems to fix the only bugs I'd encountered with it. With 10.4.1 then displaying complex PDFs could result in some characters being missing or placed in the wrong horizontal location, and images were sometimes incorrectly z-ordered (e.g. a black shadow being in front of an object, rather than behind it). 10.4.2 displays the same PDF correctly (as did 10.4.1 without Q2DE)

  • Fuck. YES. (Score:4, Funny)

    by BandwidthHog ( 257320 ) <inactive.slashdo ... icallyenough.com> on Tuesday July 12, 2005 @11:48PM (#13050367) Homepage Journal
    The hotfiles_evict thing [apple.com] is fucking killing me. If it weren't for the iBook, I would have had to do a clean install on the tower by now. If 10.4.2 doesn't fix it, you're gonna have (at least) one pissed off Apple Fanboy on your hands!!!1011!!

    '"Do you hear me Jobs?!?!?" he cried, sloshing chardonnay(sp?) all about the joint.'

    • The easiest way to work around hotfiles_evict is to free up some space on the drive. The big catch is that the freespace must have a contiguous block large enough to store the file which is being evicted from the hotfiles area.

      I had the hotfiles_evict problem on a G4 tower at work. The boot drive was about 98% full. After moving some files onto an external FireWire drive I got down to about 90% full. The problem remained. I then moved more stuff until I got down to about 80% full.

      Between the 90 and 80 mark I also disabled journalling on the volume. This, I think, is the easiest way to fix it. Disabling journalling also disables hotfiles and therefore the update daemon will no longer try to manage the hotfiles store.

      I haven't seen the problem resurface yet. Note that this was a DP G4 and so update only ate 100% of one CPU (barely noticeable). What I did notice was the fact that my boot drive suddenly had ZERO freespace because the system.log grew to about 6 GB. Yes, I know, this actually exacerbates the problem.

      I can only hope that 10.4.2 fixes the issue. I'll probably re-enable journaling and see what happens.

      Also, speaking of drive freespace: There is apparently a known flaw in HFS+ with respect to contiguous freespace. When allocating new space for the catalog a 4 MB block of contiguous freespace is required. If you don't have a 4 MB block of contiguous freespace then apparently there is a bug whereby 4 MB will be allocated potentially overtop another portion of the catalog or overtop some file's data. Not good. Best advice from what I've gathered is to never let a volume be more than 80% full. Ever.

      • It's fixed!

        I was having hotfiles_erupt on a twelve hour cycle, so it wasn't until getting home from work today that I could be sure it was really fixed. Now I can return to the quiet life of an uptime whore; rebooting nightly sucks out loud.

        • I assume you mean 10.4.2 fixed it? Good news!

          Hopefully this means I can safely enable journaling on the G4's boot drive again. Well, I probably can anyway since I freed up so much space and have already double checked with hfsdebug that I have at least a few several hundred MB chunks of freespace.

          For curiousities sake though, is your boot volume also near full?

    • sloshing chardonnay (sp?)
      If you were using OS X 10.3 and older you would not need to misspell due to the inline spell-check and the dictionary app in 10.4. Not to be a dick, I just use it all the time.

      Chardonnay
      |? sh ärdn??|
      noun
      a variety of white wine grape used for making champagne and other wines.
      a wine made from this grape.
      ORIGIN French
      • I typed that comment on my iBook, which is currently running 10.4.1. However, Firefox doesn't utilize the system-wide spell checking service. And I'm not at a Mac to check, but I don't think Chardonnay is in the standard dictionary, is it?

        And all that aside, I was clearly being facetious... I only drink red wines.

  • Please report bugs, folks! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JoshWurzel ( 320371 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @01:45AM (#13050873) Homepage
    I see a lot of people complaining on a lot of forums about this bug or that bug. Not that this isn't valid, but hoping that someone from the particular group at Apple will read your post is not a good way to go about getting your problem solved.

    Step 1: Go to developer.apple.com and sign up for a free (as in beer) membership (or sign up for one of the expensive memberships if you want free software, hardware discounts, etc).

    Step 2: Go to bugreporter.apple.com and fill out a report. You'll have to give up some info about your system and *detailed* info about the behavior, why its wrong, and what needs to be different. And if you can isolate the problem to a particular configuration, it'll help them fix the bug faster.

    These enter Apple's internal bugtracking system. Some of your complaints are duplicates of existing ones, but if enough people bitch about a particular issue then there will be more pressure to fix it.

    There is no step 3! (er, profit!)

    The downside is that you'll likely never hear back from them. Even if the bug is solved, you'll never know until they release a new version. They may decide that the behavior is "works as intended" and ignore you. There is no way to follow the progress of your bug.
    • I see a lot of people complaining on a lot of forums about this bug or that bug. Not that this isn't valid, but hoping that someone from the particular group at Apple will read your post is not a good way to go about getting your problem solved.

      Fair enough- but there are some serious bugs that still haven't been fixed, and are blatantly obvious. For example- add someone to your address book from Mail. It will flip their name around, putting "Last" in the "First" spot (YES, I'm aware of the 'sort/displa

    • The downside is that you'll likely never hear back from them. Even if the bug is solved, you'll never know until they release a new version. They may decide that the behavior is "works as intended" and ignore you. There is no way to follow the progress of your bug.

      And until they start communicating with people who file bug reports, people are going to keep complaining in public forums. Quietly waiting for months for Apple to (maybe) release a fix in the next update is rarely an option. Bitching in forums

  • 200 bugs fixed? (Score:2, Informative)

    by rorya ( 68697 )
    I think the poster misunderstood. The linked page talks about the supposed 200 new features in 10.4, not bugs fixed in this update.
  • I just installed it on my 15" 1.25 Powerbook. No problems. Overall, it seems snappier - it's definitely swapping less. However, spotlight seems slower. It's taking forever to do a simple search that I routinely do, and have done w/ 10.4 and 10.4.1.

  • The widget manager isn't much of a manager. All you can do is uncheck a widget to disable it. This basically just hides it from the widget dock. There is no way to move a widget from ~/Library/Widgets/ to /Library/Widgets/ and you can't delete widgets.
    • Agreed. It doesn't delete them. Grrr!! Some manager.

    • Re:Widget "Manager" (Score:3, Informative)

      by Biotech9 ( 704202 )
      The widget manager isn't much of a manager. All you can do is uncheck a widget to disable it. This basically just hides it from the widget dock. There is no way to move a widget from ~/Library/Widgets/ to /Library/Widgets/ and you can't delete widgets.

      To delete a widget in the widget manager, click the red button to the right of the widget icon.

      Yeah! It's complicated I know.
      • To delete a widget in the widget manager, click the red button to the right of the widget icon.

        Ooh...that works great. Now why is that icon a weird "don't go here" red button rather than a trash can? But thanks for helping me blow away Hula Girl in like 2 seconds. :-)

      • It is complicated when there isn't a red button. Maybe this is only the case for widgets in /Library/Widgets/ but that is where all of mine reside. It's not much of a manager if it can't handle this.
        • The red button should appear for all non-Apple widgets; those provided by Apple won't have it.
          • Too bad that it doesn't.
          • Try moving one of the Apple-provided widgets to ~/Library/Widgets/ and reload the widget manager. Notice how it has the red Delete button next to it now. The button only shows up for widgets that the user can delete.

            By default, all of the Apple-provided widgets are in /Library/Widgets/ and they're the only widgets that are in there. Nobody other than 'system' has write permissions to that folder, so 'system' is the only user that can delete widget bundles. The widgets that a user installs go into his h
        • The red button only appears for widgets that you have permission to delete. Note that nobody other than 'system' can write to /Library/Widgets/

          This means that normal users can't put anything in there, nor can they delete anything from it. Thus, they don't have permission to delete the widgets, thus the option doesn't show up.

          Any widget that automatically installs itself can only go into ~/Library/Widgets/ so this widget manager can delete any automatically installed widget. If you know enough to put a
          • "For the widget manager to delete widgets in /Library/Widgets/, said manager would need to run as root. I somehow think that most people who install their widgets by hand would like that even less than having to delete them by hand."

            Right, because Mac OS X applications never prompt for authorization when they need a higher level of privileges. </sarcasm>

  • Broken: Internet Sharing over AirPort (Score:3, Informative)

    by andy55 ( 743992 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @10:49AM (#13053439) Homepage

    At my home office and I use internet sharing to share my 17" powerbook's ethernet wire connection to a couple PCs in the office via airport/wifi. After installing 10.4.2, it's now broken--my vaio and my dell laptops can no longer connect to my powerbook's airport when encryption is on. Since security is an issue (and I can't have an unsecured network), I'm pretty much hosed (unless I want to go out and buy a wireless router). Sigh.

    Andy

  • WPA-PSK with AES finally supported (Score:4, Informative)

    by EchoMirage ( 29419 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @10:57AM (#13053524)
    Apple finally fixed one of my biggest complaints with this release: as of 10.4.2, OS X now supports AES encryption for WPA-PSK (a component of WPA2), eliminating the barrier to WPA2 adoption for Mac users. Among vendors whose equipment supports WPA-PSK with AES is Linksys, Belkin, Cisco, and doubtless many others.

    Three cheers for Apple!

  • er... FTFF? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by option8 ( 16509 ) on Wednesday July 13, 2005 @01:49PM (#13055371) Homepage
    my pet finder bug, which has existed since 10.0 and has been reported with each major release to bugreport.apple.com is as follows. it has been marked as "duplicate" and thus closed, so i know it's been seen and i'm not the only one who's complained. but, as yet, it has not been resolved.

    this is a long-standing "os X finder doesn't work like classic finder" issue, and while it's not a great hardship, it would be nice to see it fixed.

    Summary:
    files dragged from the finder into another application, or copied from place to place, or even file listings copied and pasted from the finder never retain the order in which they were diplayed in the finder.

    Steps to Reproduce:
    1 - select several files or folders in a finder window, in list mode, ordered by name. select edit->copy to copy the filenames to the clipboard.

    2 - open a textedit document. paste the filenames into the document. the names will be in a different order from their positions in the finder, in a seemingly random new order.

    Expected Results:
    one would expect that the listing in the clipboard, and thus in the document, would reflect either a: the order in which they were selected (not the case) or b: the order in which they appear in the finder (also, not the case)

    Actual Results:
    for example, i've created several folders via duplication in the finder, named "copy 1" ... "copy 9"

    in the finder, they appear in alphabetical order, 1-9. selecting these and copy/pasting the listing into an empty textedit document, results as such:

    "copy 7
    copy 4
    copy 3
    copy 8
    copy 6
    copy 5
    copy 1
    copy 2
    copy 9"

    clearly not alphabetical.

    Regression:
    none that i know of. selecting multiple files and opening them in their associated application opens them out of order. dragging multiple files from the finder into applications that accept dragged items imports/places them out of order, etc.

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