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I got the OS 10.2.3 updater downloaded in the wee hours of Saturday morning. A 60 MB download is a formidable proposition up on a 26,400 bps dial up connection, and it took over six hours, but fortunately there were no dropped connections. I have not installed it yet. I figure I'm going to have to do some file shifting from my OS X partition in order to make room for the installer to run. Perhaps I'll get to it over Christmas.

Meanwhile, my experiment with removing the FruitMenu and WindowShade X haxies and their preference files from their original installation under OS 10.1.x, seems to have been successful. I've been running in OS X since Thursday, with no sign of the gradual slowdown that has plagued me since I installed Jaguar, which would render OS X essentially unusable after a two-three days of of time without a reboot. After four-+ days, at this writing, things are no slower than usual, which seems to indicate that the holdover haxie preferences were indeed the culprit, as suggested in this OS X Hints article.. So apparently, my problem was not running out of swap file space.

The next step will be to install WindowShade X again, keeping my fingers crossed that it won't cause the memory leak or whatever to return. I've been trying to adapt to windowshade-less modes of dealing with multiple open windows, but not happily. I continue to be mystified as to Apple's rationale for droping windowshading, which is, IMHO, one of the slickest user interface innovations ever, from OS X.

I also got Netscape 7.0.1 for OS X downloaded (on only the third try) successfully late last week, but it has turned out to be a disappointment. I found Netscape 7.0 to be an excellent, fast, dependable browser in OS X, and Netscape 7.0.1 for Classic works beautifully OS 9.2.2, but the OS X version has turned out to be a buggy dog of a browser.

It first took forever to start up (also noticed by Gene Steinberg who says Netscape 7.0.1 feels "ponderous" on a dual processor 1.25 GB Power Mac! -- imagine what it's like on my 500 MHz G3 PowerBook....) My first half hour of attempted use involved four Force Quits, and what performance I was able to observe was lackluster. Not sure what the problem is. I thought that maybe the system slowdown had returned until I started up Mozilla 1.2.1, which is Netscape's kissing cousin, again, and found that performance had returned to normal.

I use the same preferences folder with both Netscape and Mozilla, which I know is not recommended, but I've been doing it for over a year with no perceptible problems. As I said, the Classic version of Netscape 7.0.1 is an excellent browser -- very fast and stable -- but based on my limited experience so far with the OS X build, I can't recommend it. Perhaps it's some issue with my computer setup, but the fact that Mozilla 1.2.1 works so well makes me think that it's a Netscape issue.

I also downloaded to the December 20th build of Chimera 0.6 0 and will report on it once I get some surfing mileage under my belt.

Also, make sure to check out Wil Nelson's interesting report on the Lindows OS compared with OS X and Windows XP below.

Windowshade

From Tobias Buckell

"Does anybody really find that collapsing open windows to the Dock, where they all cluster in tiny icons that look exactly the same, a satisfactory substitute for window shading?"

Not me :-) Windowshading was the single biggest, obvious advantage I came to love in my first week switching to Mac (classic), and I know many people hate it, but having it is essential to the way I work. Being able to free up monitor space and still be able to see at a glance the important windows you were using is crucial and minimize, both in Windows and Mac, has never cut it for me. I really wish it would just get reintegrated back into the system, the huge Haxie demand makes it obvious we all want it back.

I use minimizing to Dock for things that I'm using but semi-occasionally, and I use 'hiding' to get things out of the way like Mail.app that I check on even less so.

I like how efficiently these 3 methods allow me to manage 10+ applications open with multiple windows at the same time. It has completely changed the way I use computers, and what I expect of them.

re: your slowdown:

My first day of upgrading to 10.2 I found out about the Windowshades slowdown issue (it was all over the X newsites and up at the haxies site) and uninstalled, the reinstalled their newest. Since then I've been happy and haven't noticed any problems, but it was quite a molasses experience at first.

Mmm, I was wondering why you were -super- annoyed with slowness. I know X feels more 'sticky' than 9, but I've gotten to the point that even when I do work on the occasional Classic computer side by side I'm still pleased as punch with speed (menus are close), and since I upgraded my hard drive to the faster RPM IBM Travelstar it's been even better.

Tobias

Charles

Apple Menu

From David W. Murray

Dear Charles,

Classic Menu works very well as an Apple Menu replacement in X.2, and I have had no such problems as you have encountered with Fruit Menu.

http://www.sigsoftware.com/classicmenu/

As you had not found problems with the windowshade app, perhaps you were hasty in deleting it. I know of no other such app. Have a wonderful Christmas (are we still allowed to say that?) DWM

Hi Dave;

If the OS X author's experience with reinstalling the unsanity haxies after deleting the holdover preference files from OS 10.1.x is repeatable, I should be able to reinstall both FruitMenu and Window Shade X afresh without precipitating a return f the slowdown problem.

I'm definitely not prepared to live without WindowShade X for long.

Merry Christmas! (And I'll keep saying that until they carry me out)

Charles

Another 10.2 slow loading problem solved

From Mark Weaver

Hey Charles,

I too had a problem with applications in OS X 10.2.x loading very slowly. For me the fix to the problem was simple. Un-check the Netinfo box in the "Directory Access" application. Not sure why this it was even turned on by default but... Anyway, hope this helps.

-Mark

Hi Mark;

Thanks for the tip, but I looked at the Netinfo box, and it was not checked.

Charles

OS X Disk Maintenance

From Michael Snider

Hey Charles--

You write "My general observation here is that while I don't disagree with you that intensive maintenance and upkeep of OS X and will doubtless help keep performance optimized, this is not real world relevant to the way the vast majority of people use their computers. In my experience, non computer enthusiast users rarely do any disk or system maintenance at all"

-- and you're a third right. Most people don't do disk maintenance, and it's not a real world expectation to believe that they can or should. But OS X, like most modern 'nixes, doesn't need it-- there's been quite a bit of discussion of the issue on the OS X Unix mailing list, with the 'nix folks pretty solidly against partitioning except for special needs--and it won't help, except with small hard drives and partitions. That's one one of the reasons Apple recommends that X and Classic be on the same partition. OS 9 experience just doesn't translate well when troubleshooting.

Good lick with 10.2.3, by the way--it seems snappier from here. BTW, are you really surprised that system modifying software like haxies slow things down?

Best,
Michael

Hi Michael;

You seem to taking a different tack here than you *appeared* to be doing in your earlier letter. Perhaps I misapprehended you.

You're right that OS 9 experience doesn't help much when troubleshooting X, but being able to boot from 9 on a separate partition is quite helpful, and obviates the hassle of booting from CDs for maintenance chores, plus I can still use my OS 9 maintenance utilities, which is good, because I don;t have the OS X ones (and am not missing much according to reports).

I run a fairly lean Extensions folder in OS 9, but I've never found that the handful of third-party extensions I deem indispensible slowed things down. I'm not sure that the haxies in OS X were the slowdown culprit. It's an experiment based on the report I cited. However, I simply can't get along without windowshading (well, I have been now for four days, but I'm not a happy camper).

Charles

OS X Odyssey 127 Jaguar 10.2.3 Update Musings And More On Slowdowns

From Jonathan Tyzack

Hi Charles,

in response to Michael Snider you wrote:

"My general observation here is that while I don't disagree with you that intensive maintenance and upkeep of OS X and will doubtless help keep performance optimized, this is not real world relevant to the way the vast majority of people use their computers. In my experience, non computer enthusiast users rarely do any disk or system maintenance at all."

I have a few reflections to make on this:

1. The vast majority of (Mac) users will not have partitioned their drives to the extent that you have, if at all, so I would hazard that in this instance you yourself don't represent the average "real world" usage - especially so for non-computer enthusiasts who probably have no idea that you even *can* partition a drive.

2. It is fairly obvious that your OS X partition is too small for *optimal* performance of OS X. Granted this has occurred because of a lack of experience on your (and pretty much most other old-world Mac users) part with OS X owing to its newness and also due to its being a very different kind of beast relative to the old OS - I too might have gone for something similar with a hard drive as small as yours and, pertinently in this case, on the back of my OS 7/8/9 knowledge. Unfortunately for you, this has proved to be a situation where treating OS X as if it is OS 9 has proved costly. Learn from it and correct the problem if you can. If it were me, I would be looking to backup my files and completely wipe that drive as soon as possible.

3. "The fact that you need a bunch of third-party utility applications, that most people don't have, is another. If this sort of regime is absolutely necessary in order to extract decent, consistent performance OS X, then Apple should bundle the necessary utilities along with instructions for their use."

Well actually, your average user won't need these utilities... as I suggest above, you are in a particular self-inflicted situation that the majority of OS X users will never experience in months/years of use as they won't have partitioned their drives, won't have as much stuff on their drives and for newer machines, will have vast acres of space on their multi-GB systems for swapfiles and the like. The only people likely to suffer as you have, are those with nearly full disks or partitions like yourself but you and they will be a minority. Incidentally, if you treat OS 9 or earlier the same way (smaller than optimal partition or nearly full disk) you suffer the same problems, something I know from experience from when I installed OS 9 on too small a partition and discovered that I couldn't actually print a (largish) document as there wasn't enough space for it to spool into! My response was to wipe the disk and start again with much more sensible sizes for each partition.

As it stands now, I only have two partitions - my Classic one which is relatively small (2GB) but large enough to let OS 9 "breathe" when it has too, and my OS X partition which accounts for the majority of my disk space (36GB) and has plenty of room for invisibles etc. FWIW, this is how many swap files had been created on my system after nearly 13 days of uptime:

As you can see, that is approaching a GB in used space so try and imagine the situation on your system after a similar period, especially when you *hadn't* de-fragmented your drive! Shudder.

So, my advice is please, please, please wipe your hard drive as soon as you can and start over in the knowledge that OS X needs a bit more respect when it comes to breathing room. More than likely, your Classic environment issues will also clear up with a nice clean install...

Anyway, I'm going to be pretty much computer free for a month from tomorrow so I come to the other reason for writing... happy Christmas and I hope you enjoy the New Year! Keep up the good work and I'll enjoy catching up on your column when I get back from my break.

Cheers,
Jonathan

P.S. 10.2.3 installed and all seems well so far - dare I say it, a touch snappier too! ;-)

Hi Jonathan;

Merry Christmas to you too.

In my defense, when I partitioned my drive I was taking Apple's spec. of a minimum of 1.5 GB of drive space (for OS 10.1) into account. I figured 4 GB would be ample for an OS X partition. Were I to do it over, I would go at least twice that.

In the new OS 10.2 second edition of his Mastering Mac OS X tome, which I am currently reading for review, Todd Stauffer notes that the minimum spec. is still a 1.5 GB partition, and he recommends a 3 GB partition, so I wasn't too far out in left field going with 4 MB. In any case (see above) my slowdown problem seems not to have been runningout of swap file breathing room.

However, I simply don't have time, nor can I afford potential downtime hangups, to reinitialize the drive and start over from scratch. When I get another computer.......

Charles

Windowshading

From William H. Timberman

Charles,

I not only get along without windowshading, I always considered it frivolous at best, and a great nuisance at worst. Moreover, I'm very fond of the way OS X lets you bring forward one window of a running app. without bringing the others with it.

Given your work habits, I realize you might find this assertion hard to believe, but I assure you it's true. The moral: there's more than one way to skin a cat, or if you prefer, variety is the spice of life.

Bill Timberman

Hi Bill;

Different strokes, I guess. As Tobias noted above, windowshading is essential to the way I work. If WindowShade X were not available, I really couldn't consider doing production work in OS X. Just too annoying and inefficient collapsing documents to the Dock and/or hiding applications to get to the Desktop.

Charles

OSX odyssey 227 & defragging

From Guy Teague

Hi Charles:

I know and work with several Unix Admins and I've run RedHat Linux for years. I have never myself run a disk defrag utility on Linux--I wouldn't even know where to look for one for Linux. I've never known any of my Unix admin friends to run such a utility. As far as I've been told, the Unix VM system doesn't need such 3rd-party or external apps.

As with the antivirus companies (who I believe pay virus writers in order to drum up business), I think the disk tools folks are gouging the gullible Mac crowd.

RedHat used to set the swapfile partition to the size of physical memory, e.g., if you had 64mb RAM, you swapfile would be 64mb also. I think the recommendation was to double physical RAM size if you were running server applications. I ran servers with only 80mb physical memory and 2gb disk space without problems. Of course it was a little slow running X-Windows and KDE or Gnome with such as system, especially on a P166, but the server and CLI worked just fine.

If Apple follows the same pattern (and I haven't checked) and you have 512mb RAM, then you will need 1gb free at all times for the swap file.

Someone who knows more Unix and the HFS file system might provide a definitive answer to the above or at least an expert opinion. I'm just speaking from my experience in running Linux workstation & server.

/guy

Hi Guy;

Defragging seems to be one of those controversial issues. I've always been a pragmatist about it myself. It never seemed to do much good in the Classic OS, but defragging my OS X partition did seem to speed things up a bit.

I have 640 MB of RAM, so I probably need more than the less than a gig of free space I'm currently running.

Charles

Why I Use OS9 On My iBook

From Chris Long

http://www.mjtsai.com/blog/archives/2002/10/05/102_finder_still_slow.html

This guy BLOGs -- hasn't written a ton but a lot of his stuff is GOOD reading: http://daringfireball.net/

This looks like a good 'un, altho i haven't looked closely: http://www.macattorney.com/tutorial.html

Lindows 3.0 Report

From: W. P. Nelson

Having rather liked Apple's OS X and Unix underpinning I thought I would buy Lindows 3.0, a Linux OS with a GUI ($119 download including third party software access) and a 2nd hard drive for my Wintel white box.

It is rather interesting, installs in about 5 minutes and their click and run access to third party software make installing Linux based software a snap. Lucky for me that whitebox that I bought fully supported Lindows 3.0 however the Hercules Video card I had installed did not so I reverted to the onboard shared video on the motherboard. With the 1.6 gig Intel iron, 40 gig WD HD, and 512 meg RAM it is much more than snappy(fast). It does allow you in as root which is amazing! It does not have many of the really neat functions of OS X but for basic Web surfing, word processing, email, burning songs on CD's etc it is just fine and at a rather reasonable price.

Total cost of my system with Lindows 3.0 was $1100 and even less at today's hardware costs. The OS costs $30 but their gimmick is in the required $100 for the third party software access which is mostly free at other places and an optional $300 full membership for all OS upgrades, third party software access and install, and posting access to the forums. Otherwise the $119 download get you read only access to forums and web access to tech articles.

But so far no real problems and I do like the speed!!

Followup on Lindows OS

From Wil Nelson

A follow-up on Lindows after my last e mail and a few after thoughts based on 4 days of using Lindows 3.0 and comparing to OS X,10.2.3 and Windows XP Pro.

Lindows (Linux w/a GUI) is an interesting OS and as I said is fast on a 1.6 gig Intel chip but it still is a work in progress and needs tweaking to iron out some bugs. I see some of the same problems that I saw in early versions OS X such as erratic mouse behavior and long hangs (spinning wheel or kernel panics in specific situations or specific applications), it will only copy to a text editor rather than directly to a word application so then you have to copy from text editor to a word application, Lindows does have a method of easy access to AOL mail through its mail program/Netscape Browser which is very nice. Limewire download will not install on its own so maybe I need to learn more about Linux/Unix or is a feature of Lindows which forces you to use its Click & Run software setup which is fee based but very cheap. It needs more software written for it such as tax preparation software to name one. OS X is much more refined and easier to use.

Apple has removed from view a lot of the more obtuse aspects of using and the need to learn about a Linux/Unix OS. Lindows has a way to go on this issue.. Use of the program does help one to more fully realize how GOOD a job Apple has done on ease of use with Unix/BSD. Poking around in LIndows with its open exposure to Linux underpinnings does help one to become more familiar with its filing system and mechanics and thereof understand more about OS X.

I run Windows XP Pro on a second hard drive on this Wintel "white box" for a few very specific reasons and in my humble opinion I think that Apple's OS X and other Linux based programs well give Microsoft a very good run for its money! Apple does need faster processors from MOTO and IBM along with speed improvements in OS X. For my uses I turn off as much of the graphical stuff as I can in all three OS's. After being more fully able to compare the GUI of Jaguar/Widows/Lindows it is apparent the Microsoft really needs to come up with a modern OS to stay in the game as Windows is really archaic when compared to OS X and LIndows. I think Apple will do very well in the Unix/Linus/BSD race due to its superior interface and ease of use. I find reading and learning how to use UNIX and its variations stimulating, frustrating and very dull all at the same time(Reading about UNIX/Linux does a good job of putting me to sleep at 10 minute intervals). My main concern is still "how can I use these machines to get my work done in a fast and efficient manner" or in other words "how much money can I make and how fast can I make it" with this computer and OS. Apple still is ahead in this area as I do not have to spend my time mucking around in the innards of OS X to fix things gone wrong.

Regards,

More followup on Lindows

From Wil Nelson

While Apple could use faster processors based on what I have seen in comparing OS X to Lindows it occurs to me that Apple/OS X are taking a fairly good hit in supporting carbon for OS 9 and OS X. As soon as we can get away from this overhead the better off we will be.

Hi Wil;

Thanks for the excellent reports. I've been intrigued by Lindows, and it's interesting to hear that it's delivering on its promises, but that it still has a way to go to challenge OS X.

Charles

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore

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