July 24, 2001
Mac OS X is, without a doubt, a milestone on the evolution of Mac OS and the future of personal computing. I recently had the chance to install Mac OS X on an iMac (Revision D, 20 g hard-drive, 160 MB of RAM, 333MHz G3, 24 CD drive). I must say, I am not exactly impressed. Here is a list of some bugs and features that I found confusing and bewildering.
- I discovered that if you hit S at start up, you can become the super user quite easily, by passing into single. While I was unable to use netinfo dumps to their exact effectiveness (the primary component in hacking the machine), and neither was I able to start netinfo manually, I am none the less disconcerted that it is so easy to become root, and could easily happen accidently to any newbie who may know enough about Unix to wreck everything. This worries me, a lot. I believe there is a patch to fix this hole.
- For some reason on my iMac I ran into the classic 10 GB logical cylinder limitation. This is quite frustrating because I had to reformat my hard drive 3 times before I figured this out. Some one please correct me if I am mistaken or this changes in the future.
- UFS support is, at best, sketchy (or so I find). Classic would not boot under Mac OS X when Mac OS X was booted off of a UFS drive, so I gave up and installed the two side by side on the same HFS+ drive (bizarre bed-fellows). I tried using the disk utility to format the other partitions to UFS, but to no avail, as it would only allow for me to format them as HFS or HFS+. I went down to command line and used the Apple disk utilities (contained within /sbin) to format the partitions, but I only succeeded in confusing the hell out of the machine by making damaged partitions and trying to mount them, passing them off as real. Again, if there was some secret I'm missing, I would be pleased if someone could /msg me about the error of my ways.
- USB support is erratic, at best. My optical mouse rarely wakes up properly after the machine goes "to sleep mode", and the mouse wheel it has seems to work in random applications. Sometimes it just stops randomly; in any event, I each time it fails I am forced to unplug it and plug it back in to reinitialize it. Sometimes I am forced to do the same to the Keyboard as well. This is quite an annoyance - were I ever doing something critical and this would happen, I would probably be quite upset.
7/30/01 Update: With Apple's latest automatic software upgrade, this seems to have been fixed. Simply ignore the previous argument.
7/31/01 Update: It seems that Cocoa programs perfectly support the mouse wheel, which explains why it's function works in some programs but not in others.
- The administrator sudo system is disconcerting to me on the command line. It is a fall-back to Multix, actually, where the system was to have multiple administrators so that the blame could rest on the shoulders on one person, instead of an account meant to be accessed by a single system administrator or fellowship with knowledge of the password. I suppose I'm just like that, but I want to have an ACTUAL root I can get to, other then through single-user mode and sudo (in the rare case that a hacker manages to get sudo to break itself - wholly possible within the system, actually). There is a kernel hack to fix this which I haven't tried.
7/31/01 Update: I was wrong here. It turns out that in fact it is quite possible to enable the user account through NetInfo, not a kernel hack. See HOWTO: Enable Root User in Mac OS X.
- It is just plain slow. I know that the memory requirements are harsh, but I haven't seen that it supports conventional swap, and I have yet to manage to figure out how to set up swapping to a file (can it?) I was hoping for the crisp, fast little OS I used to love in NeXTStep. I'm kind of disappointed in this; and there is a lot of reliance on the operating system, at full steam, to make calls to Classic (IE can only call Classic applications, even when Aqua equivalents exist).
7/31/01 Update: I have been informed that IE has had bug fixes and is over such problems. Also, it should be noted that a swapfile is set up by default, and, furthermore, you can set up a filesystem in order to house the swapfile. See the writeup HOWTO: Enable Dedicated Swap in Mac OS X.
- I can't compile a good deal of free software on this machine, particularly for work, do to the lack of Case Sensitivity in the HFS+ filesystem. This is mainly because GNU software tends to have back-up Makefiles as lowercase... so I am out of luck as UFS doesn't operate well at all.
- 7/31/01 New Problems: It seems that VNC for Mac OS X has some bugs related to certain keyboard buttons being mapped funny. They place the blame on Apple, not on themselves. Additionally, the command chsh doesn't actually enact any changes, further frustrating the usage of command line. One can get around this with NetInfo Manager (changing the entries for shell for particular users).
- 8/1/01 Current Conditions: A while back Steve Jobs promised all of his little Children of the Apple that he would give them a free upgrade. Well, times change, and the devil speaks with a forked tongue anyhow. Needless to say, there is no upgrade, you can go give Apple a cool $100 to get some measly system performance increase... *sigh*.
And so that is about it, I think. Despite a lot of things not working, at least it looks GREAT! I still prefer KDE, which at this point has just as many bells and whistles, but still lets me get my work done. Please correct me if I am wrong on any accounts, I love suggestions.
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I think the iMac will be running LinuxPPC very soon from now...