Another pre-release build of Mac OS X 10.4.3 was among the software seeds reportedly released by [Apple]. Now at build 8F31, the third maintenance release to Tiger is is approaching 110MB in size and includes well over 500 minor fixes and enhancements. The frequency in which Apple has released new builds of the update indicates that a release is on tap for the first half of October.
hmmm, I think I am asking to much from the company that gave us the iPod Nano – anyways I think I will keep dreaming and maybe by X.5 there will be support for OpenGL 2.0.
i think the same
If your not cloning your boot drive to a external drive, you better learn how now.
1: Disk utility erase w/zero a new external
2: Repair permissions on original drive
3: Carbon Copy Cloner (make bootable in prefs) the whole shebang
4: Set clone to boot or option boot to it and check it out carefully
5: Disconnect.
6: Pray 10.4.3 holds, if not, boot from the clone and Erase/reverse clone.
7: Breath easy.
If it is a critical machine — most home machines are not — then it makes good sense to back up every time you install any significant new software, not just an OS upgrade. And, remember, if you’ve tweaked your installation in a non-standard manner, then you get to fix it when it breaks.
“If your not cloning your boot drive to a external drive, you better learn how now.
1: Disk utility erase w/zero a new external
2: Repair permissions on original drive
3: Carbon Copy Cloner (make bootable in prefs) the whole shebang
4: Set clone to boot or option boot to it and check it out carefully
5: Disconnect.
6: Pray 10.4.3 holds, if not, boot from the clone and Erase/reverse clone.
7: Breath easy.”
If you have such little faith in the update would it not be simpler to install the update on the external drive and boot from that to check everything out.? But I do agree with you on the hold your breath part. I tried twice to upgrade 10.3.9 to 10.4 and had to revert to 10.3.9 because of problems not so much with the update but conflicts with some of the 3rd party software I had installed. I will be trying again in the next day or so to see if the updates since the original release have solved my problems. Since I have two internal drives it is fairly easy to install on the clone and then fix any serial number problems that crop up.
Hi guys. Consider making a fresh install instead of upgrading from 10.3.x to 10.4.x. I think you would avoid some of you misfortune. Isn’t it possible to migrate ones settings and data?
References to a PPC 970MP dual-dual core has been found in certain Apple software.
If true the PowerMac will live up to it’s name as a real beast of a machine, being a Quad processor. I’m wondering if Apple is going to keep a foot in both doors, Intel for the smaller cooler chips and IBM for the hot beast chips from hell.
Apple has made plenty of hardware sales from the G5 processor, they never said they were going to dump IBM completely, a Quad X-Server will sell very nicely.
I’m wondering if Apple will include a low powered G4 processor along with the dual-core Intel chips for their other lines, it would give Apple hardware a advantage over similar PC offerings, running the OS/Altivec on the G4 leaving the dual core x86’s free. Would help lock the OS to the hardware and be able to run Win software natively to boot.
I like how Apple is driving demand for flash memory to get the quantity up and the price down, this will bring solid state nano notebooks around much faster.
BlueRay is going to need a seperate device, I wish they would dump the whole motor rotation concept and go with something beter
If I remember correctly; Apples transition is suppose to be complete by 2007; however they have a contract with IBM till 2008. It is a possibility for them to keep both doors open.
I wish I still had the link to the article. Hey but it could be that Apple just wants to covert with time to spare; just in case.
IMHO
that contract was actually with freescale, and it is almost certainly for models under warrenty
it is called extra parts!!!!
“6: Pray 10.4.3 holds, if not, boot from the clone and Erase/reverse clone.”
Pary it “holds”? This isn’t an XP service pack or patch. Every version of Tiger has been perfectly stable for me.
lucky you, but if its a critical system you will want to make a backup first! its not unheard of that an apple upgrade does not hold (one dissabled firwire on my old crt iMac, that was some fun to fix let me tell you!)
Every XP service pack has been perfectly stable for me.
Congratulations, you’re one of the few people for whom SP2 didn’t screw up something royally.
Me too- every patch has been solid for me from Apple. I know some people encounter problems, but a majority of those issues tend to be caused by the users’ installation of third party apps and so on. Repairing permissions before and after updates, and backing up your system before said updates is very wise for any OS in any case…I’ve just never had to do it for Mac OS X.
I have noticed that I have had to repair permissions less and less with tiger.
Take it from a old Mac veteran who values the stability of Apple’s OS all these years, take the time to make a clone.
Apple is close to perfect, but nothing is, and hard drives indeed do fail quite unexpectatly. Third party programs do indeed get broken, like Maya and Quark for example.
Or just gamble it breaks so you have a reason to rebuild your boot drive, it’s not like we have a excuse to do it every week or month like Win users on average.
A great commercial program is Deja Vu, it backups up folders and even clones drives automatically via a schedualing option.
I like cloning manually because I want to double check things and keep the drives disconnected just in case my forages deep into the underbelly of the internet uncovers a nasty.
For years I didn’t have any troubles with updates from Apple and then came 10.4 … the update to 10.4 went okay. Both additionals updates (10.4.1 and 10.4.2) crashed my system (kernel panics) and forced me to re-install Tiger. Really didn’t mind the first crash since:
– A. I had a backup
– B. Had to do a clean install sometime after going from 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4 without a new install, ahum.
But the second crash was not funny at all. First it came at a terrible inconvenient moment (yes, I know … shouldn’t haven’t pressed that ‘yes’ button) and I lost 2 months of mail. It had been backed up, but I couldn’t restore ‘m. Strange thing, because I can still read the mail from the backuppartition (with any editor). I simply don’t get ‘m in Mail. app
Had my powerbooked afterwards checked at two Apple servicecenters, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with the machine. In the end I replaced my memory with new stuff from Apple in the hope it will make a difference and now I’m axiousely awaiting 10.4.3 …. and yes, that LaCie is up and runnig with a backup and I have an automatic backup on my network somewhere … both backups are daily updated.
No matter how stable your Mac has been, please make that backup. I know from experience what it is to have that ‘Windows’ feeling on OS X: will it wake up, or will it just die … waaaaaaaaaaaaaaa …
ever hear of “Archive and Install”?
it makes a backup of your data and then installes the new system.
Being new to the mac (recent switcher) I would really like some advice on backup techniques for mac and also about what software to use for backup.
I have an external USB drive and I would like to do my backup of the main drive on that drive. In case the main drive fails for some reason, how can I boot from the USB drive?
Far as I know, you can’t. I’m not up on the latest Mac hw offerings, but at least until recently you couldn’t boot from a USB drive – you need to get a Firewire-connected drive to make a bootable backup of your main hd. Once you’ve got that (and they aren’t that expensive nowadays) you can use the free utility Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable backup of your entire main hd, and later use it to backup changed files to keep it current. Or you can get the shareware utility SuperDuper that does the same thing but has perhaps more options.
You can’t boot from USB. At least not in general. I have the latest powerbook revision and it won’t. I had gone out and bought a large USB 2.0 external drive for exactly this purpose only to discover that it wouldn’t boot from USB. That was quite surprising to me, actually, and very upsetting. I got a firewire drive now that works just fine for this purpose. (BTW, if you have a copy on an external drive you want to boot from, just hold down the <option> key and turn on your Mac. After a time, it will give you a menu to choose the boot volume.)
Since I upgraded from Panther – the battery life on my iBook G4 has got really bad under Tiger.I used to get 2-2.5 hours before but now I’d be lucky with 1.5hours and the system just powers off when it stating that theres still 40% left. Thats been my only realy gripe with Tiger so far.
Anon
what the heck are you doing to that iBook? I get 4 hours easy.
Nothing much – just some photoshop, e-mail, web, scripting and occassionaly the odd film. Under Panther – I easily got 3+ hours and it would only switch off when at 0%. Under Tiger if the battery indicator dips to approx 40% it just switches off no warning or nothing and its been like that since the upgrade a few months back which was a clean install.
Anon
I had to put a hard drive in my powerbook – after that the battery has died. be lucky to get 30 mins on it, tried looking for software solutions but can’t find any
They don’t mention it, but hoepfully this will also include these memory leak fixes for Safari.
http://webkit.opendarwin.org/blog/?p=24
After several days of being open under my normal usage patterns (Twenty to thirty tabs divided amongst five or six windows) Safari often becomes unusably slow.
As far as backing up goes just keep all your important data on a Firewire/USB drive (Back it up regularly to a second drive, yah hey?) in open formats and you can use your data with just about any recent computer even if the udpate kills your Mac. (And restoring the Mac is as simple as a full erase and reinstall.)
If this is the release that will finally bring 10.4 anywhere near the stability of 10.3. I’m getting tired of waiting, Apple.
Is this my personal impression, or have anyone found this type of problems too.
I have discovered kernel crash frequently and the first version of Mail didn’t start at all (problem solved in the first update: They found that is was due to GPG AddOn).
However OS X 10.3 a previous version were so robust. They only produced me one kernel crash in 3 years.
OS X 10.4 has been great here, I have it installed on 4 Macs and haven’t had a single kernel panic, it’s as stable as Panther for me – it just looks funny, bring on Leopard so I can have a unified desktop again – PLEASE!
I find I rely on Apple far too much for my own good. I click the installer as soon as it becomes available and I haven’t actually had any reason to regret the decision.
Of course I have backed up my personal folder on the second hard drive and I’ve burned a copy to a DVD, just so I don’t lose years of work to a dumb head crash.
So far, I have had no complaints. I’d prefer it if these bugs weren’t in there in the first place, but software doesn’t work like that exactly. I’m happy for the fact that they do release regular patches. If you ever worked with OS 7.5.1 and you waited for an upgrade, you know it took a while. Apple is doing a good job of maintaining their environment. Within the confines and the limits of an operating system I can’t complain as a user of the system that there is no concern for the quality. 500 bugs is a lot, but I heard that Microsoft was battling with 200,000 bugs and the legacy of backwards compatibility.
Not to bash Microsoft, just to indicate that it takes a great deal of work and dedication to make it work halfway decent.
I can’t wait for the new upgrade. I WILL backup my files first.
> You can’t boot from USB.
How odd. I’m running off of an installation on a USB hard drive. Well, anyway, as long as /it/ doesn’t know that it shouldn’t work…
And please don’t tell the other USB drive on my desktop that I sometimes boot off of, containing Panther for testing purposes.
Bugs in MacOS X? No way. It was God who himself wrote MacOS X and it is perfect in all ways. I call BS and FUD on whomever reported this news. Stupid Microsoft funded patch development at Apple, always slinging dirt on other operating systems. What’s next, are we going to see patches for security fixes? Everyone, don’t believe anything this article says. Your computer is perfectly fine the way it is because MacOS X is a perfect operating system.
you are just quite the master of sarcasm aren’t you
Shut up
I wonder if this will complete and enable by default the new Quartz 2D Extreme GUI.
Yes, any news on this? This was by far my most anticipated feature in Tiger, and it is still turned off by default! Does anyone know what the problem is?
Same here, I have had no problems installing SP2. The people that got their pc screwed up probably had adware all over their pc and also had everything like antivirus running while installing sp2.