Mac OS X 10.5.3 To Fix Over 200 Bugs, Coming Soon

An anonymous reader writes "MacScoop reports that 'Apple has seeded several builds of its Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.3 update to developers during the past few weeks and just seeded yet another one numbered "9D34" earlier today.' The update fixes over two hundred bugs, weighs almost half a gigabyte and should be available soon."

I hope it's true

[xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D (1160707)]

Will they fix Spaces? Make X11 usable?

Once upon a time, you could buy an Apple product and expect it to work. Then the common wisdom became "as long as you don't get revision A, it should be okay". Now I'm to the point where I'm not even expecting the fucking fourth revision to work properly.

Re:

[Pope (17780)]

The "Don't buy Rev A." only applied to hardware. Me, I don't see any advantages over 10.4, so I'm sticking with that as long as I can.

Re:

[mortonda (5175)]

Could you clarify what's wrong with them? I use both all the time with no problems.

What's wrong with Spaces

[pauljlucas (529435)]

Suppose I have Terminal windows in space 1 and Safari in space 2. I'm currently browsing in space 2 and I now want another Terminal window here in space 2. I Command-Tab to switch to Terminal. I'm immediately brought back to space 1 which isn't what I wanted. I'm forced to create the new Terminal window in space 1 and move it to space 2. Note that if instead I immediately switch back to space 2, Terminal will no longer be the front-most app.

If I already have a Terminal window in space 2 and want to create another one, this fact doesn't help because Spaces keeps track of the space the front-most window of an application is in. So even if there is a Terminal window in space 2 but a Terminal window in space 1 is more "front-most" than the one in space 2, then when I Command-Tab to switch to Terminal, I'll be brought back to space 1. Again, this isn't what I wanted.

The current behavior of Spaces whereby it auto-switches spaces or changes what the front-most app is (presumably to be "helpful"), IMHO, makes Spaces broken and unusable. Spaces should never automatically switch spaces nor change the front-most app no matter what (or at least have a Preference to make this the case).

I've been an Apple fan-boy since my Apple ][plus, but Leopard is the first version of OS X that I thought wasn't very compelling (and kind of broken) on release.

Re:

[Onan (25162)]

I'm curious as to what it is you feel would be the more correct behaviour when foregrounding an application whose windows are on another desktop.

Are you suggesting that the OS should focus some unknown windows on another desktop that's not currently visible to you? Such that if you were to switch to Terminal and start typing, you would be blinding typing into some unknown window?

Or are you suggesting that some new application behaviour should be created in which an application can be topped in some general

Re:What's wrong with Spaces

[AlpineR (32307)]

I think Anonymous Grump is referring to a hidden preference:

Disable Space switching on Command-Tab in 10.5.2 [macosxhints.com]

That might solve your problem of Command-Tab'ing to an application without changing Space. For me, I tend to open applications with the mouse. It'd be nice if I could tell Terminal and Camino to default to opening a new window on the current Space rather than transporting me to an open window on another Space. But I'm slowly forming the habit of opening new windows with right-clicks instead.

Re:

[XxtraLarGe (551297)]

Did you ever use OS X versions 10.0 or 10.1? Those two versions of the OS were absolute nightmares. I couldn't recommend OS X over OS 9 until 10.2 came out. I've been using 10.3.9 for quite some time now, and it has been extremely stable. Now we just got a 24" iMac last week and it seems to behave pretty flawlessly EXCEPT my wife's dock seems to disappear every once in a while under her account. I can't duplicate the problem under my account, but I'm hoping this problem will be fixed in the update.

Re:I hope it's true

[corser (995751)]

I had a similar issue. I could duplicate it by the following
1. Turn on full screen visualization in iTunes
2. Stop the music (or otherwise have iTunes to nothing)
3. Allow the computer to start the screen saver (or turn off the monitor )
4. Wake up the screen
If will now be exited from the visualization but the dock will be missing. My guess is that starting a full screen app sets a flag to hide the dock and the method I describe bypasses setting it back.
I was able to get the dock back by going into full screen visualization and then exiting it.
(* trying it again right now to make sure I'm not a liar)

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

For usable X11, install the latest Xquartz [macosforge.org].

Big Creepy Crawlies...

[kiwioddBall (646813)]

Thats some patch! Nearly 500Mb - With 200 bug fixes thats 2Mb or so a bug.. Them bugs are big 'uns! Surely that figure is inaccurate?

Perhaps it will roll out piecewise like Vista SP1 and take only 65Mb to download on your average machine.

Re:

[je ne sais quoi (987177)]

They might be replacing binary files that they can't run a patch on, or maybe there's some other reason... but regardless you can be reasonably assured that they won't just put 500 Mb download for no good reason.

Re:Big Creepy Crawlies...

[Ilgaz (86384)]

It is "developer seed" and "combo". It means, it is not end user version and in mac land, combo means "zero patch, all files updated since 10.5.0 with all language resources".

Vista/XP does very aggressive patching on windows update. If a Mac general end user who kept his/her system up to date with software update sees 10.5.3 , it will be almost 5x smaller (or even less) than the 500 mb you see.

Also, "Developer Seeds" may have symbols, debug stuff implemented on them, they are intended for developers and never cleaned up like end user shipments. It is never a "lets download, copy the what's new and leak to some site" kind of file release :)

I don't want to get in too much details but the Apple's userbase are known to change icons, remove/add languages thanks to unique HFS+ filesystem. On Mac land, you can only trust to binaries to patch. It is another reason why Apple or any Mac software vendor can't ship pure patches except binary patchers. For example, people keep changing safari.app icon, it is trivial on OS X since only the resource portion is changed or they remove languages (not good on Leopard btw) from their applications.

Re:Big Creepy Crawlies...

[Halo1 (136547)]

Apple does do delta updates [apple.com].

Re:

[Halo1 (136547)]

No, there are three possible versions of most updates: combo updates which can be applied to any previous version (with the same major version number), regular updates which update Mac OS X a.b.m to a.b.n, and delta updates which do the same as a regular update but which are smaller (due to the use of binary patches rather than including all replaced files in full).

The ability for software update to use delta updates was introduced in Mac OS X 10.3.4, as the support document I linked to implies (it's not li

Scanning...

[sarabob (544622)]

Well, if it fixes the airport scanning problem [apple.com] then I'll be a happy bunny...

Leopard has been fine for me

[Thornburg (264444)]

Just to contrast the "great, because 10.5 has been so buggy for me" posts:

I've been using 10.5 on two different machines for quite some time now, and I have had not had very many problems at all, and none since the 10.5.2 update.

Re:

[fermion (181285)]

I installed 10.5 the week it came out. I don't normally do this, but I had ne machine was really getting bogged down on the original 10.4 install, and 10.5 was a good excuse to give it a fresh install. Given that it had been three years since the last update, I thought it was a good risk.

Overall things worked ok. X windows was more or less down, but that is has been a common problem, and I have moved away from depending on X. That said, I don't think 10.5 was functional until 10.5.1. We will see what

Aluminium Keyboard Update Bug

[neoform (551705)]

I know I'm not the only one with this bug, but Apple still hasn't responded to this problem. My software update *always* lists the "Aluminium Keyboard 1.0 Update" as being ready for install, no matter how many times I install the update. It's very annoying.

Re:

[FrankDeath (746264)]

I had the same problem. You're not actually completing the installation. Download the fix from Apple's download page (http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/) and run the update manually.

Just 200 bugs?

[grikdog (697841)]

Which 200 bugs are they talking about? Why do they know about 200 bugs? Does that mean 200 users of Mac OS X 10.5.3 have been screwed, if each bug is sufficiently obscure? What is the average user footprint of each of these ten score bugs? Isn't progress wonderful? Now we use statistics and databases to decide how many bugs HAVE to be flushed before users balk and refuse to buy. In the old days, bugs were personally embarassing to the poor sap who perpetrated them during development. I guess we have

Re:Just 200 bugs?

[0100010001010011 (652467)]

OS X uses quite a bit of OSS stuff. There's a good chance that a good portion of these bugs aren't theirs.

http://httpd.apache.org/security/vulnerabilities_20.html [apache.org]
I see 3 vulnerabilities in Apache 2 right there.

My Leopard install is showing "OpenSSL 0.9.7l 28 Sep 2006" while my Debian machine is showing "OpenSSL 0.9.8g 19 Oct 2007". I imagine there might be a few bugs there, and it's late enough that it wouldn't have been released close enough to be included in 10.5.0.

Lets see in /usr/(s)bin, zip, gunzip, tar, efax, cron, ip6config, postfix, cups. No chance they had any bugs. They're good open source software.

Responding to you and the guy below, the reason that these bugs are 'so big' is that Apple isn't sending out a bunch of .diff files as updates. If they're upgrading Apache 2 they have to recompile as a universal binary and send out that entire file.

Audio Problems in 10.5.2...

[weston (16146)]

Some recent discussion on audio in Leopard:

http://createdigitalmusic.com/tag/leopard/ [createdigitalmusic.com]

Now, note in particular that Digidesign's struggles aren't limited to Leopard (see, for example "Digidesign and M-Audio Drivers Fail to Keep Pace with Vista, Leopard, and XP SP3") -- I personally think Digi as a company has a problem. But they're not the only vendor mentioning audio issues in 10.5.2, and there are others like MOTU who haven't been explicitly complaining but have had product release delays (DP 6 was supposed to be out Q2).

Re:Just 200 bugs?

[Paradise Pete (33184)]

Which 200 bugs are they talking about?

Here is a list [apcmag.com]

Bugs in Software Update

[vapspwi (634069)]

I recently upgraded my MacBook to 10.5, and have been regretting it. I only use some of the new features (don't really care about Time Machine, one of the biggies), and a lot of stuff that used to Just Work (wireless networking) has become problematic.

The biggest problem I had, oddly, was with downloading software updates - the downloads would mysteriously stop after a few seconds or minutes (and not due to loss of network connectivity - a Windows box on the same network was able to download stuff rock solid, at the same time), and would never resume. Had to do some kind of Mac voodoo (Restore Permissions, or something like that) to fix it. So I'm a little concerned about even being ABLE to download a 500 MB software update, due to bugs in the software...

JRjr

Re:

[Ilgaz (86384)]

If you have a broadband connection, act like us, old fashion guys.

Run Terminal (if you don't want to buy a dl manager), get the "combo" with curl (all OS X 'es have it,pre installed) or use a user friendly extension to firefox like "flashgot" which can use curl. Just launch the installer from DMG.

The good thing is, you can write it to a CD-RW or USB Key. I always keep last "combo release" on a backup disk replacing the previous one. It is also a great favor to Mac using friends if they come by.

Another thing

Fixes

[WilyCoder (736280)]

Here [apcmag.com] is a compiled list of fixes in 10.5.3.

Re:

[oahazmatt (868057)]

Interesting. The Safari bookmark/.Mac Mail account bug is so important they fixed it twice.

Re:

[starglider29a (719559)]

I read the list, and my eyes glazed over. I run PShop, Parallels, MSOffice, InDesign, RDC to my server. I thought I worked this poor 24" iMac to death. But I don't even know what 99% of those bugs are. Never been near them.

What I have seen more of is "Identity Crisis" as I run Parallels, Spaces and RDC. Keyboard shortcuts that do one thing in one environment, do something else in another. Try running IE in Parallels and press F11 to go full-screen. Exposé takes over and ZOOP! Everything heads to th

Critical bug

[AlpineR (32307)]

Thank Jobs, they fixed this:

Text-to-Speech and Hysterical voice no longer causes hang

Now my business can finally make the switch to 10.5.

Re:Service pack 3?

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

OS X 10.5 is, in many ways, a big step up from 10.4, but it was clearly rushed to market. I've been using it since the official release, and it's felt like a beta OS for all of that time - random pauses for a few seconds, crashes every month or so, occasionally taking two or three attempts to resume from suspend and so on. It's really hard to tell whether the improvements with 10.5 outnumber the regressions at this stage, and so this is a very welcome update (although, really, this should have been 10.5.0 and the previous ones should have been betas). In general, these don't contain new features, although occasionally they will, but they will be minor improvements, while the big changes come in the major releases (the 10 isn't really part of the version number, it's part of the name).

Re:

[jandrese (485)]

Personally, I've not felt that 10.5 is that big of a change from 10.4, which has always made it extra strange that it is that buggy. The main reason I upgraded (Time Machine) has always been solid as well. I still like the 10.4 dock better, it's not quite as featurefull but it is easier to see.

Re:

[archkittens (1272770)]

i dunno how stable time machine is supposed to be, but it certainly isnt on the imacs we got at school for our art lab. of course, the fact that art students are the ones who keep managing to mess things up with it might have a great deal more to say about the problem...

Re:Service pack 3?

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

I thought Time Machine was great when I saw the demos, but it is completely incompatible with File Vault, which means you have to choose between security and safety for your data. You can kind-of use it with File Vault, but it will only run backups when you log out (which is something I only ever do to reboot for software updates), and so is completely useless.

The biggest improvement with 10.5 is that Spotlight now actually works. In 10.4 it was so slow that I could generally find files faster without it. With 10.5 it is fast enough to be useful.

I keep my dock on the left side, attached to the top-left corner, and the 10.5 dock is about as nice as the 10.4 one, just different. Most of the visual 'improvements' make things worse. The transparent menu bar is hideous with most background colours. The larger drop shadows are okay, but they don't really make up for the fact that the new style gives less of a visual clue as to which window is raised (I've typed things in the wrong window a lot more often since upgrading). There are lots of little regressions, particularly in the text system (CoreText is definitely not ready for prime time) and especially with Rosetta.

The new Preview is very nice - I now use it exclusively, where I used to use 3 different apps for PDFs, and Quick Look and Coverflow are both nice for browsing the filesystem, although I don't use them very often. Support for ODF in TextEdit is definitely useful for small docs, since OO.o takes forever to launch.

I do, however, find I am using fewer and fewer Mac-only apps, so I am not sure if my next computer will be a Mac.

Re:

[Pathwalker (103)]

If you set the OpenFirmware password, then clients connecting via FireWire are blocked from doing direct memory access.

Re:

[nawcom (941663)]

Heh, the leopard dock was something I found weird. It was like they planned to make the end users figure out how to customize it or something.

http://www.innermindmedia.com/dock_doctor_app.html [leoparddocks.com]

http://leoparddocks.com/ [leoparddocks.com]

Re:Service pack 3?

[sdpuppy (898535)]

Ha! Back in my day we "time machined " using tar -u -g -v -f $backup_disk/$backup_dir/$backup_name up hill both ways in 10 feet of snow and we liked it! - heck our time machine had shiny knobs and dials with detailed oak scroll work not like this cheap plastic injection molded junk and and...

hey kids, get your durn iPods off my lawn!

Re:Service pack 3?

[nine-times (778537)]

I still like the 10.4 dock better, it's not quite as featurefull but it is easier to see.

I don't know if this will be helpful, but I found I liked the Leopard dock better after running:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

It gets rid of the 3D look and gives the same look that the dock takes when you move it to the side of the screen.

Re:Service pack 3?

[delire (809063)]

I don't know if this will be helpful, but I found I liked the Leopard dock better after running:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

With cryptic commands like these just to get basic functionality how can anyone expect Normal Users to migrate to the platform? This is exactly the kind of thing that happens when you let geeks design user interfaces!

Re:

[nine-times (778537)]

Are you kidding? This is an unsupported interface tweak-- the command line is just a quick way to make the change. There are several ways to make this change, including downloading a freeware utility that lets you tweak your system.

Personally, I think this is *exactly* the way things like this should be handled. Give people an interface for making the most common tweaks, and expose the more complicated tweaks in such a way that 3rd party developers can come up with other ways to handle it. That way, yo

Re:

[clang_jangle (975789)]

Having used Apple machines much of the time since 1987, I have long ago stopped rushing to the newest OS version. It's almost always best to wait six months to a year after a new point release, it will usually take that long to be really ready. I dislike that, but my experience with FreeBSD, Debian, and even Windows tells me that's pretty much the way they all do it.

Re:

[mr_matticus (928346)]

10 isn't really part of the version number, it's part of the name).

No, it's definitely part of the version number, just like the leading 5 (or now, 6) in Windows version numbers. What it's not is the major release number (that's the second, just like in Windows).

The breakdown is very simple: Generation.Major_release.Minor_release, with build numbers appended to that. Windows does an almost identical pattern Win2k (5.0), WinXP (5.2), etc. MS's numbering is non-sequential, but it's not really any different. Hell, Windows 7.0 is actually being called Windows 7 for now.

'

Re:

[demallien2 (991621)]

No, the previous post was correct. The 10 in Mac OS X 10.5.3 is most definately NOT equivalent to the 5/6/7 in Windows. Think of it in terms of the names. Windows 5 = XP, Windows 6 = Vista, Windows 7 = ...
Mac:
10.3 = Panther, 10.4 = Tiger, 10.5 = Leopard.

The fact that the name changes should be a big indicator for you that this is a major release, not just a 'point' release.

If you don't like the marketting way of looking at things, think of it from the software management side of things - APIs don't chan

Re:

[demallien2 (991621)]

Windows Server 2003 is a different line of product, as is Mac OS X server on the Apple side. Why bring it up? As for XP/Windows 2000, How many apps written for XP didn't run under 2000. I personally never came across any. That's because there were hardly any changes to the API, and the few major changes were backported to Windows 2000 anyway.

On the other hand, just try running software written for Leopard on Tiger. Under the bonnet, these two version of Mac OS X are massively different, with the intro

Re:Service pack 3?

[1729 (581437)]

Here's Apple's take on this:

gestaltSystemVersionMajor
      The major system version number.
      For example, in 10.4.12, this would be the decimal value 10. Available in Mac OS X v10.3 and later.
      Declared in Gestalt.h

gestaltSystemVersionMinor
      The minor system version number. For example, in 10.4.12, this would be the decimal value 4.
      Available in Mac OS X v10.3 and later.
      Declared in Gestalt.h

gestaltSystemVersionBugFix
      The bug fix version number. For example, in 10.4.12, this would be the decimal value 12.
      Available in Mac OS X v10.3 and later.
      Declared in Gestalt.h

From http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Reference/Gestalt_Manager/Reference/reference.html [apple.com].

Re:A few corrections to OP

[tepples (727027)]

Go to the next starbucks and do it there

Pretty tough to get an iMac in there, no?

Seriously, where in the more or less developed world where people can afford Macs do you still have a per megabyte limited internet.

Residential Internet connections in at least New Zealand and Australia still have low monthly caps (by world standards) on bandwidth to the American and Eurasian continents.

Re:Service pack 3?

[bhima (46039)]

It's more like a *nix version increase than an MS service pack... sort of. Apple uses a lot of open source BSD stuff... so when they update all that stuff it has whatever the open source crowd has done, plus whatever Apple decides to do with it. I recall some new features in the 10.4 succession... so I guess 10.5.3 might contain some new features but I wouldn't hope for anything earth shattering (like ZFS). I truly wish they would fix the Bluetooth audio headphone thing but I suppose it isn't priority.

People still have dial up? I expect that Apple would ship disks on request but I wouldn't expect them for free. I've never had Apple refuse a reasonable service request but I've never asked for that. Also I'll bet you can download a PPC or X86 (or a version for a specific sort of Mac like my cube) which is substantially smaller. That universal binary thing is really, really nice (my 8 core mac pro can boot from the same hard drive as my Quad PPC G5 and my PPC G4 Cube) but it makes things twice as large.

I would say that sane Mac users will ignore this news and wait until the software update app on their Mac alerts them. Really smart users will postpone that for while to see if there are a rash of catastrophes caused by the update⦠even if there is a bug fix or update they are interested in.

Re:Service pack 3?

[Phroggy (441)]

People still have dial up? I expect that Apple would ship disks on request but I wouldn't expect them for free. I've never had Apple refuse a reasonable service request but I've never asked for that.

You can also stop in at an Apple Store [apple.com] if there's one in your area, and they'll usually give you a copy for free, from what I understand.

Re:

[Goaway (82658)]

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=564973&cid=23555707 [slashdot.org]

Re:I hope they finally fixed IPv6 now...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Posting as Anonymous Coward because I've already modded this thread and don't want to waste the mod points, but I also want to be helpful.

You can quite easily configure static IPv6 addresses via System Preferences. It's not all that hard. Here's how:

1. Open System Preferences.
2. Click on the Network preference pane. (Optionally, select or create a location from the Location drop-down.)
3. Select the network interface you wish to assign a static IPv6 address.
4. Click Advanced...
5. Depending on the interface (e.g. Airport), you may need to select the TCP/IP tab, if it is not selected by default (e.g. Ethernet).
6. Change the Configure IPv6 drop-down from Automatically to Manually.
7. Input your settings for Router, IPv6 Address, and Prefix Length.

That wasn't so hard, now was it?

Re:Friendly Reminders

[ratbag (65209)]

And as an anecdotal rebuttal to all that, I've personally updated two machines from Panther -> Tiger -> Leopard and my family at large has done Jaguar -> Panther -> Tiger -> Leopard on G5s, PowerBooks, MBs, MBPs and MacPros, using a wide range of software (we're all photography buffs, one of us is a designer, two of us are developers, one MacPro is still running Tiger). Backup, upgrade. If you have problems, do a clean install. But so far we've done just fine with upgrades, thanks.