Mac

I installed Mac OS X 10.3 “Panther” on my iMac yesterday, after a false start. I prefer to do a virgin reformat and reinstall rather than use the upgrade options, and I made a backup on my WiebeTech Fire800 external hard drive. When that turned out to be thrashed, I thought the installer had reformatted both drives. It turns out there is an incompatibility between Panther and Firewire drives using the Oxford 922 chipset, firmware revision 1.0.2, at least when connecting a Firewire 400 Mac to a Firewire 800 drive. After upgrading the firmware to 1.0.5, everything is back to normal. Fortunately I have off-site backups for most of my files. Normally, I would have a second backup on a drive that I specifically selected because it uses a different Firewire bridge, the Indigita-powered EZQuest Cobra+, but as Murphy would have it, it was back at the manufacturer for replacement after the hard drive in it started failing. Never assume anything…

An interesting thing is there are some changes to the Panther BSD core that are clearly designed to make it more familiar for Linux users, at the risk of breaking things for previous OS X users. The default shell is now bash rather than tcsh. Some userland utilities like tar are now the GNU rather than BSD version. Terminal.app sets the environment variable TERM to xterm-color (it used to be vt100), another Linux idiom. vi has been replaced by vim, a close, but not strictly identical substitute.

Since I burned out of the Linux constant upgrade treadmill in 1993 (after having had to recompile gcc and the kernel three times in a week just to install applications), I appreciate system stability like the one provided by Solaris, and have very mixed feelings about these changes.

I upgraded my iMac G4 (flat panel, with SuperDrive) today. I prefer doing a full reinstall of any major OS upgrade rather than an upgrade install (because I am afraid there might be leftovers of the old OS that can trip me up later), and I did so.

The install procedure worked smoothly, but it did not install iDVD. An upgrader for iDVD is available for download from Apple’s website, but it requires the presence of iDVD 2.0, which can only be ordered from Apple for $19.95, not downloaded. And of course the iDVD 2.0 disc is not included in the disc set provided by Apple with the iMac G4 (at least, the one I got; I ordered my iMac the very day it was announced, perhaps people who got it with Mac OS X 10.1 were more lucky). Grrr…

I found a workaround, which is as follows: copy the disk image files iMac HD Disc 1.dmg, iMac HD Disc 2.dmgpart through iMac HD Disc 6.dmgpart onto your hard drive from the system restore CDs. then double-click on the first one, which will be mounted. You can then drill down to the Applications folder then drag-and-drop the iDVD folder into the Applications folder on your startup disk. After that, apply the iDVD 2.1 updater you downloaded from Apple’s website.

I haven’t tried burning a DVD yet, but the program seems to work.