Submitted by After a long gestation period, Apple has updated its Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system to version 10.5.7. This latest update comes packed with lots of bug fixes for several components of the Mac OS X operating system. Update: Various security updates for Tiger and Safari:Win were also released.
Support for RAW images has been improved (which happens quite often), a bug with DVORAK keyboards has been fixed, reliability and accuracy of Unit Converter, Stocks, Weather and Movies Dashboard widgets has been improved, the Expansion Slot Utility for Mac Pro has been fixed to report the proper PCIe slot configuration, support for ethernet switches with flow control has been improved, and various other improvements and bug fixes.
Other areas of focus were iCal (nothing about the dock icon, though), Mail, parental controls, and printing. As always, you can install it through Software Update, or download the stand-alone installer (combo and delta). Report success or failure in the comments!
This is what I wrote at TUAW:
Dear lord, have we become so jaded by the constant churning of inane feature bloat that we go meeh at stability fixes. Im pretty sure that everyone that is affected by what is fixed in this patch is very happy that it is released. With that said, there is nothing forcing you to download this patch and i would even recommend not applying it unless it fixes some problem you are having.
and this is as it should be. both windows an linux suffer from the “we need to change things even if they work” syndrome. i love apple for keeping things thesame so i know where to look and how to do stuff. this makes me more productive and a happy user.
take the ribbon from office or the configuration panel differences in 2000/xp/vista for example, that sucked!
oh, and for the record, the update installed just fine.
Edited 2009-05-13 22:00 UTC
Mmm, for me, Software Update seems to hang at 75%, when checking for new updates.
I guess it’s rush hour.
Hung for me as well, and took the desktop with it =/
A hard reboot later and everything seems to work, but the updater claims it is going to take ~15 hours to download the damned thing.
I hate patch days 😛
Does 10.4 still get security updates? A friend of mine still uses it on his MacBook. 10.4.11 came out in 2007.
Yes Tiger still gets updates. Apple generally continues to maintain their OSes for 5 years after release. Tiger was released in 2005, so they’ll keep on providing updates till next year.
I am sure I speack for everyone (except those who are on PPC) when i say, please put all avalible resources on 10.6! This is what we’ve all been waiting for.
Wow, I downloaded mine and received an error that says:
“Mac OS X Update” cannot be saved the digital signature for this package is incorrect. package may have been tampered with or corrupted since being signed by Apple.
I will try again and see what happens.
wow, twice, perhaps they are just busy?
I got the same error twice on my MBP, but my gf’s MacBook downloaded and installed just fine.
I’m going to download from apple’s website instead of Software Update.
my computer completed the updated but won’t boot anymore, completely useless. Rescuing won’t help either. Look out with the update.
I couldn’t get it from update; I downloaded it from the apple site directly. When I rebooted, it cycled through the spinner repeatedly. I shut down, on reboot it did the spinner continuously, then rebooted itself at least twice before getting to the login and giving me a heart attack. This does seem like a flakey load process (much preferred 10.6 and earliers update cycle).
After all of that it did boot into the system properly and everything seems back to normal.
Ugh. I gave up waiting for the updater to do its thing and did what you did, with the same results.
Apple’s update process IMO could use some improvement. I dislike having little idea what’s going on during system updates. Little swirly things and progress bars don’t give me the warm and fuzzies.
Thank you for giving absolutely NO details as to the setup of your machine – install an update and then screaming on a forum is apparently what amounts to ‘constructive feedback’ these days.
Never install delta updates, always go for combo and NEVER install hackware on your computer; you’d think that after the initial 10.5 ‘blue screen’ fiasco that people would learn – but it seems that there are people out there who are suckers for punishment by ignoring all conventional wisdom.
Not using combos is not a “conventional wisdom” only FUD. My six Macs all update via deltas and I did not have any problems since 2002. If the system is in a good condition, delta updates work just fine.
Only if Apple decides to switch default rights for users between major versions of OS X (e.g. 10.3->10.4 or 10.4->10.5) you can run into trouble if you update. But this is not a delta vs combo issue.
It’s amazing how I hammer on and on and on for people to install Combo’s, they scream in my face, moderate my posts down, and send abusive posts to me – days later they install the combo update and all their problems seem to ‘disappear’. Its conventional wisdom because if you spent at least 5 minutes to read some posts from some of the largest forums you might realise that this has been an on going recommendation for end users to do. But then again, you find it easier to stalk me and moderate my posts down.
Edited 2009-05-13 06:11 UTC
I do not stalk, but yes, I mod you down because of FUD.
If you temper with system files, frameworks or system directories you are in a good position for problems with delta updates. But if you put things where they belong, no delta will fail.
But since you are an Apple expert, you will know this….
Pff, I was lucky to get a few minutes internet with my laptop on a neighbourgh wifi netwerk with my main machine going beserk. So I couldn’t give details.
It is fixed now, after doing a hard disk repair from the restore cd (while I found out my optical drive was bad, but that’s a detail).
Details: Power Mac G5 July 2004, Dual 2Ghz G5, 4.5 Gb RAM, 1.16 Terabyte HD, extensions installed EyeTV Hybrid, Flip4Mac, Perian, Virtual PC.
I had a bad suprise with 10.5.7. My macMini on my TV could not go to 1360×768 anymore.. only 1280×720!
Luckily using SwitchResX, as explained here fixed it.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2004318&tstart=0
I also had a bad surprise with 10.5.7 and do not recommend it to anyone who uses OSX for DVD viewing. I also have a mini but with a Samsung plasma TV. I previously could only put the TV in 1920×1080 interlaced and was surprised when it did not say it was interlaced. It also gave the options for 24Hz and 30Hz where the refresh rate was grayed out before. I never tried the SwitchResX before.
I was not pleased to discover the update changed how brightness and contrast are displayed. For caligrating my TV, I use a DVD with test patterns and a Huey Pro. After the update, it is like a filter was applied to remove grays below black level and above white level. As a result, I cannot calibrate my display accurately anymore. I think I will need to reinstall. I’m going to see if it does the same with a normal monitor before though.
After changing to another monitor and back it appears to be better. I’ll wait and see if it happens again.
I found it occured consistenlty for one user profile but not the other. rm -rf ~/Library fixed it.
I’ve still got to look at the security fixes. I’m wondering if they finally fixed WebKit since Google already did a security update, concerning the pwn2own issue. [sarcasm]It’s only been several weeks, but oh well, I’m a worrier. Security isn’t important at all.[/sarcasm]
Concerning other bits, I’m hoping that they’ve fixed the multiple application menubar menus overlaying each other and my constant fight with the virtual memory system and its poor performance. I’m going to be positive about this since these are the last few updates for this machine.
One thing was unexpected. It seemed to update firmware and re-boot and continued from there. 449 MB? That’s just massive for an intermediate update.
I wasted over 660 megabytes of my download allowance last night to get the 10.5.6 update for a friend’s Macbook Air, and now they’ve released 10.5.7…
Does it fix the problem where you can’t connect to a WEP network with a passphrase? No? Oh well, maybe Apple will catch on to the concept of “quality control” and “usability” some time in the next decade.
Mate, if you weren’t so lazy and spent some time surfing the internet you would find that 10.5.7 was slated to be released last Friday or sometime this week; no one was ever pointing a gun at your head and forcing you to upgrade to 10.5.6 when all the information out there indicated 10.5.7 was to be released soon.
You use WEP? you might as well have the whole damn thing wide open – I guess security isn’t all that important and you don’t mind any tom, dick or harry to log onto your wireless network and leech bandwidth (which I find funny given you moaned about a 600MB download using up your allowance).
I’m tired of questions like this coming from fellow Apple users. The fact that he uses not-so-good security doesn’t mean Apple shouldn’t fix their OS. He’s the customer, he uses WEP, and he rightfully expects the damn OS to work.
It’s the same attitude that gave us Push Notifications instead of full multitasking on the iPhone.
The question begs one to ask if her/his wireless router/access point can’t manage WPA/WPA2, and if it can only manage WEP then perhaps the person should upgrade their hardware for better security seeing as WPA isn’t going to be deprecated before WEP–it’s already deprecated.
Besides the point. If he wants to use WEP, that’s his decision. Maybe he lives in the middle of the Australian desert.
The point here is that Apple should fix their bugs. Not that he shouldn’t use WEP.
Type $ before the password to force OS X to treat it as hex, instead of ASCII. i.e. “$deadbeefdeadbeef”
My machine (Powermac G4) wouldn’t shut down after the combo update install, but after a hard reset and a couple of resets later, I am rocking and rolling. Safari 4 with the security fixes feels a little snappier. Everything is fine otherwise.
Is the annoying resolutions bug fixed yet?
That one that only appears in OSX with a minidvi (or dvi) to HDMI cable and makes the resolution support to max “1920×1080 interlaced” on some screens. Helluva annoying. Some has suggested switchresx but i never got anything good out of that.
My Finder shows version 10.5.8 after update, that`s kinda weird, isn`t it? This Mac shows 10.5.7 of course.
Finder was already at that version with 10.5.6 and it’s just another application. You can replace it with the Terminal application, if you wish. I’ve done it when Finder was broken.
As to my earlier installation, things seem to be working nicely and I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Lots of bugfixes, and yet the only two bugs I was hoping to see fixed are still present (Spotlight crashes frequently when searching from the menubar, and files dissappear when copied to empty Windows shares).
Alas…
printer driver gone. easy to reinstall but that’s not nice…