Cool Mac Gear

Based on the title of Jon Atkinson's OS News essay, "Why I Ditched Mac OSX for Linux...," I expected another dreary PC-centric, anti-Apple rant, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Atkinson is no Windows-drone and actually a big fan of Apple hardware. It is OS X that he's underwhelmed by.

"To be honest," he writes, "I only really wanted to play with Apples for the hardware. Apple hardware is, in my opinion, the best manufactured and designed hardware bar-none. Macs are sexy, cool and hell, they last for years."

Ont the other hand, he says, "For my uses, Mac OS X isn't all it claimed to be." In the first paragraph of the article it was clear to me why John had issues with OS X performance. His Mac is a second-hand 500 MHz iBook, 256mb, with an ATI Rage 128 graphics accelerator and 8 MB of VRAM and a standard CD-Rom drive -- a machine that offers less performance than my 500 MHz Pismo PowerBook which has a faster system bus, 1 MB of backside cache, and 640 MB of RAM. I find OS X Jaguar performance on the Pismo no more than tolerable, and John's complaints about OS X on his iBook sounded very familiar.

• The RAGE 128/8 MB graphics card doesn't support Quartz Extreme so one has to make do with standard 2D rendering. John says he "experienced small amounts of graphical lag right from the start with OS X." Hey, d'ya think?

• "Scrolling a Finder window with more than 10 or so icons in it would produce skipping and visible refreshing, something I thought died with Windows 3.1." I certainly wouldn't have expected such poor performance from from a 256mb system, when my Amiga 500 managed such tasks and performed better, at least in terms of responsiveness, than this in 1991."

• "The 1024x768 maximum resolution of my iBook simply didn't seem enough for OS X...consider the cavernous expanses of desktop you get in Windows 9x at that resolution.... I can't see how Apple can justify the cramped feeling of OS X on such a high-resolution display."

• "waiting for my computer to catch up to me just isn't the way to be productive.... I should never have to wait for tasks to finish when using simple desktop productivity applications. "

• "Simple little things can kill your computing morale; I don't want to watch an icon bouncing up and down while an application starts; I want those extra cycles put to use to make said application start faster in the first place. Even simple applications like the terminal were taking around ten seconds to load; unacceptable when all I wanted to do is issue one command (and yes, opening the terminal, waiting, then issuing that command is still faster than using the Finder)."

Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. These are some of the exact same things that drive me nuts in OS X, and saying so should not incite accusations of perfidy and treason. John is not an OS X basher. He notes that "I think the OS X concept is great, and given a few more version revisions and a truckload of optimisations and I'm sure they'll be on to a real winner...," but "For now, and more importantly, for me as a power-user, OS X just isn't good enough for doing the things I need to do."

Now, there are some who will say that John (and I) should just buy a faster Mac, or even just more RAM -- the typical hardware upgrade treadmill that many Mac-users seem to accept as normative. John objects: "However I feel that Apple have concentrated on getting OS X running nicely on their top-end hardware and ignoring those of us who can't afford or just don't want to upgrade to something a faster. I'm sure the same accusation was raised by 386 owners when Microsoft released Windows 95, but my iBook is just 18 months old, and certainly not ready for the scrap-heap yet."

I would argue the same about my Pismo, which was an expensive computer to start with, is only 2 1/2 years old, and has had its RAM upgraded to three times what John has in his iBook. I figure that a high-end PowerBook should give one at least five years respectable service. It's interesting that John, who is a self-described power-user, thinks he should be getting the hardware power he needs from a 500 MHz G3 machine with 256 MHz of RAM, and certainly if he were running OS 9 he would find that the little iBook had plenty of speed. The bottleneck is OS X. Or more specifically the formidable overhead imposed by the Quartz/Aqua GUI layer in OS X. John, as a veteran Linux user, was used to more scintillating performance on modest machinery from a Unix - based system. As he puts it, "I like to do everything by hand, and I'm most comfortable using Linux as it's what I run for my clients on their web servers. I've been using Linux on the desktop on and off since Redhat 5.2, and I've now been Microsoft free since 2001."

Consequently, after three months of struggling with OS X on the iBook, John began looking for a PPC Linux alternative. Debian PPC was available, but he didn't like the idea of having to download and configure everything from scratch. He took a look at SuSE, but their PPC offerings haven't been updated since 7.3 (2001), and he wanted to be a little more current than that. John doesn't mention Mandrake Linux for PPC in the article, and I would have been interested in his comments on it, but he eventually settled on Terra Soft's Yellow Dog Linux 3.0, which he says is essentially a port of Redhat 9 to PPC.

I'll let you check out John's detailed account of installing YDL 3.0 on the iBook. To summarize briefly, it went well, and John lavishes praise on the superb job Terra Soft have done in making Linux integrate with the Mac. He comments: "I was pretty much speechless. I've had various problems with laptops and Linux in the past, and I didn't expect everything to work so well out of the box. If anything I was a little upset I wouldn't be able to get my hands dirty under the hood to make it all work again :-)"

"I love my Linux iBook," John declares. "It really is the perfect computing platform. The marriage of such excellent hardware and a Linux distro customised to take advantage of it all make the iBook a joy to use with YellowDog. Using it for day-to-day tasks brings back a joy that I thought died with the Amiga. Everything just works. If you're someone who needs to use their computer to work, and can't tolerate software failure or hardware incompatibilities, this Yellow Dog Linux on Apple hardware fits the bill very well indeed."

Hmmmm. If only OS X worked as well on lower-end Apple hardware like iBooks and G3 PowerBooks. I still maintain that it would be great if Apple were to offer a "no-frills" version of OS X for older and slower machines, with a more modest iteration of the Macintosh GUI and of course Mac application support, which is of course the big thing that is missing with Linux on the Mac. One big difference between John and myself is that he affirms he is "not an Apple user for the software." I'm not an Apple user just for the software, but it's a big part of the equation for me, and I can't imagine getting along without, say, Tex Edit Plus or the great OS X browsers.

On the other hand, there are probably some cool Linux applications as well, many of them freeware, and YDL is a low cost OS alternative. It's good to have alternatives, and if PPC Linux will help entice more people to switch to Apple hardware, that's great. Incidentally, Terra Soft will sell you a new Mac with Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed.

Anyway, I encourage you to check out Jon Atkinson's article, an enjoyable read whatever your perspectives on OS X and Linux.

You can find it here:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3596

Finder Services and memory redux

From Michael W Snider

Charles,

The excellent Word.Service conflicts in some way with the Services provided by iPhoto. Removing either one from the Services directory (either /Library/Services or ~/Library/Services) and logging out and in restores Services to the Finder and several other Carbon apps.

About memory--I know you use WindowShadeX, Charles, and other haxies requiring the APE manager. Have you tried removing them long enough to see if they're the cause of your memory problems? If they are, then they need to be fixed, not the OS--But since Apple has no obligation to support hacks of its UI, they'll probably break again.

Since you can't work comfortably without them, I suppose you'd better hope it's Apple's problem and not theirs. But test it, Charles.

Best,
Michael

Hi Michael;

Thanks for the Services tip.

He haxies; the only one I currently have installed is WindowShade X. Trying to find the solution to the slowdown problem several months ago, I uninstalled all haxies for about a month. It amy have helped a bit, but I later reinstalled a newer version of WindowShade X, and it seemed to cause no trouble in 10.2.4, which worked well after I got on to running system maintenance apps. from time to time. Indeed, 10.2.6 seems to have settled down over the past day or so after I ran Cocktail 2.1.1. I ran the full slate of Cocktail routines immediately before running the OS 10.2.6 updater last weekend, so didn't figure it would need it again so soon, but go figure.

Charles

Re: Services in Mac OSX 10.2.6 Finder

From Andy Hector

I've tried this out under 10.2.6, but I can't reproduce his problem. I have all sorts of services available when I select a file in the Finder.

-- Andy

Hi Andy;

I just checked again with various types of files selected in the Finder. No submenu appears, although a full slate of services are available in Safari.

Strange.

Charles

Carbon Copy Cloner

From Kevin.Larson

Hello Charles,

you recently wrote:

Anyway, downgrading to OS 10.2.4 from 10.2.6 would be a much more formidable proposition, and one that I simply don't have time to mess around with right now. Perhaps Cocktail will keep me going until 10.2.7 or Panther arrives. Or I might just go back to OS 9 for a while for production work. Sigh. It should be better than this, 2 1/2 into OS X's public release.

There is a better way. It's called Carbon Copy Cloner. Before applying an upgrade or update, I run various disk and file utilities, repair permissions, defragement and then clone my hard drive (in my case to a firewire drive). After then using the new system for a week or two and I can decide if I want to continue using it or not. Do not forget to back up your home directory durring this period.

TIP!!! You can also use
the sync functions from CCCloner to do this. That way I can revert back and still have my actual documents - a good reason to install third party programs and extras in your home directory equivelent folders: ie home/app or home/libiray, otherwise configure CCCloner to sync any and all other folders.

Another advantage --- you have a new subject for a future Oddyssey.

Please you owe it to yourself and your readers to try it.

Kevin

Thanks for the tip, Kevin.

Carbon Copy Cloner sounds like a great product.

I'll put it on my list. ;-)

Charles

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

CM

Charles W. Moore