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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

Mac OS X 10.1.5 Update Available 210

krugdm writes "The Mac OS X 10.1.5 update which was hinted at in the MS Office update changelog is now available through Software Update. From the updater: 'Update 10.1.5 delivers enhancements which improve the reliability of Mac OS X applications, delivers improved networking, security, support for PC Card serial communication devices, and expanded peripheral device support.'"
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Mac OS X 10.1.5 Update Available

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  • Rage Pro (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mr100percent ( 57156 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @10:34PM (#3642781) Homepage Journal
    It now supports 2D hardware acceleration and Quicktime support for the Rage Pro. Finally, the rev/A iMacs and iBooks can use OS X faster. Works quite well, windows on it seem snappier.

    • Re:Rage Pro (Score:4, Informative)

      by berniecase ( 20853 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @11:23PM (#3643015) Homepage Journal
      Ya know, I wouldn't have believed it was possible, but I got a 300 MHz iBook to reliably play one of Apple's MPEG-4 example movies in full screen. I was quite impressed with that. This update is rocking my world, so far.
      • Re:Rage Pro (Score:3, Informative)

        by foobar104 ( 206452 )
        Ya know, I wouldn't have believed it was possible, but I got a 300 MHz iBook to reliably play one of Apple's MPEG-4 example movies in full screen. I was quite impressed with that. This update is rocking my world, so far.

        That's amazing. I tried QT 6 this morning, under 10.1.4, and found it pretty damn lacking. Even the 300 kbps streaming sample movie couldn't play more than 1 or 2 frames per second, even though my network was wide open.

        Just now I tried it under 10.1.5. What a difference a point release makes!
    • Re:Rage Pro (Score:2, Informative)

      by Alex Thorpe ( 575736 )
      A minor correction: It's the Rev/B through Rev/D iMacs that use the Rage Pro. The Rev/A has a Rage II with 2MB video memory. It never was suited to any sort of 3D acceleration.
    • Re:Rage Pro (Score:2, Interesting)

      by superposed ( 308216 )
      Rage Pro acceleration is an enormous improvement, at least on my iBook. For reference, try scrolling quickly through a big Slashdot page in IE or OmniWeb with 10.1.4 -- the scroll "thumb" lags about half a second behind the mouse cursor. Then try it with 10.1.5 -- the "thumb" stays right there with the mouse cursor (maybe 0.1 second behind). Window resizing is also much improved. This makes the computer feel a lot snappier.
    • Oh, nice! Up until now, I haven't been able to recommend OS X for anyone with (say) a Lombard or beige G3, but now... it's at least a viable option.
      • According to everymac.com, beige g3s don't have a Rage Pro card unless they were produced after May 1998. Before then they have a Rage II+.
  • OS X 10.2 (Score:1, Funny)

    by DiSKiLLeR ( 17651 )
    So when is MacOS X 10.2 planned?

    From earlier stories, it looks like some really nice speed enhancments adn goodies are planned!

    D.

    --
    http://www.MarsFirst.org/ -- Martian News. And other stuff.
    • Re:OS X 10.2 (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      10.2 is supposed to be released 'by the end of the summer' in apple speak Sept. 30th
      • But summer just finished!!!

        Oh, wait. You meen in the US. I forget you people have different seasons to us Aussies ;)

        D.
        • I'll be upgrading my one OS X Mac when I get home. Is there any info anywhere about upgrading an OS 9 Mac to OS X withoput blowing away the old stuff on it? I've got a beige G3 and a slightly older G4 dual running DNS, 4D mail/webservers on them. I just bought out my ISP, actually, so I'm still learning about my new hardware/software.

          DiSKiLLeR, I have to ask. Does your toilet water drain counter-clockwise? I now the seasons are reversed, I'm wondering about the coriolis effect of the earths spin.
          • For upgrading an OS 9 Mac to OS X, just stick the OS X CD in and install (booting off the CD of course). It'll dump a whole ton of crap all over your hard drive, but it won't touch any data already there (assuming you're using HFS+, which it's hard to imagine any Mac not using these days).

            Of course, if you want to do fancy stuff like partitioning your drive for the option-boot trick and OS X swap, you'll need to erase everything. But if you just want to set up and go, it's perfectly safe to just install, to the best of my knowledge.
    • The AC was correct, that the next major rev will be released in late summer. Officially, however, it is codenamed 'Jaguar' and is not being referred to by Apple as 10.2. Doesn't mean it won't be 10.2, but officially it isn't yet. Check out the full details here [apple.com].
  • by xtal ( 49134 )
    No mention of updates to the slow-ass finder. Finder as an application is so slow, with large numbers of files and directories it's effectively useless. This isn't too bad, as I usually use the shell. When an application necessitates me using the finder though, it's infuriatingly slow compared to windows explorer.

    I'm beginning to get annoyed, I've had my Tibook for a long time now (8 months?) and this issue still hasn't been addressed.

    And yes, I run the maintenance files. That does nada. We'll see if there's any improvements tomorrow, but no mention either.

    • Nope, the finder's still at 10.1.2 - last updated 19 December 2001. No noticeable finder updates in this one.
    • No mention of updates to the slow-ass finder.

      That doesn't bother me any - I have the fast version. Apple keeps the slow-ass Finder in reserve, so they can sell it to idiots.
    • Hey, at least it's faster than nautilus. Personally I have found finder to be less than adequate anyways. Bash is my file manager of choice
    • I'd like to know how, exactly, this is flamebait. Finder IS slow, and it IS annoying. Otherwise, I love OS X.. oh, wait, independant thought and dissention is bad around here. Oops!

      • I'd like to know how, exactly, this is flamebait.

        Aside from a few vocal, attention-starved whiners who have nothing better to do than move files around and scroll Finder windows back and forth all day, most of the people who have made an honest attempt at using it, have found OS/X's performance to be acceptable for getting Real Work done. It's not perfect, of course - nothing is. But the amount of whining that some people do over trivial issues is pathetic and annoying - thus, flamebait.
    • Yeah, the OS X Finder sucks (hopefully only for now). But there is a decent shareware replacement. I haven't messed with it too much (I gave up on OS X), but it seemed pretty full featured. It's called SNAX [cocoatech.com]. I do remember it being wicked fast, though. And this isn't by any means a defense of Apple or an implication that the user is at fault, just a suggestion to the parent poster to make his life easier with the hardware he already has.
  • This update lets Carbon apps use Quartz text antialiasing, which everybody knows is the very best thing about Quartz.

    In about five minutes, I'll let you know if IE takes advantage of this feature yet. I'm betting that it won't without an update.
    • Sorry, but the release notes say "Updated applications" can take advantage of Quartz text smoothing. You'll have to wait until IE is updated in a few weeks (although it may be sooner than you think). But, Office X will definately take advantage of this feature with this past Monday's SR1 update.
    • In reply to my own comment, the answer is no. IE doesn't use Quartz text rendering under 10.1.5 yet. OmniWeb is my dad.
      • "OmniWeb is my dad."

        Really? Surely Chimera [mozdev.org] should be your dad. Or at least your mum.

        • Really? Surely Chimera should be your dad.

          Nope, sorry. OmniWeb 4.1 beta [omnigroup.com] is faster than Chimera. It launches faster (2 bounces as opposed to about 8 for Chimera) and it renders a lot faster. It's also rock-solid stable-- I haven't used Chimera enough to speak for its stability.

          But OmniWeb has this one tiny feature that I simply will not live without: you can filter web addresses based on regular expressions. For instance, I have images2.slashdot.org filtered; no more banners or... uh... whatever you call those big square things that I see in the middle of an article when I'm not using OmniWeb.

          No, sorry, OmniWeb is truly my dad.
          • Fair enough. I can't argue the speed and the reliability points, mainly because I've never used OmniWeb. However, I will say:

            ObMozEvangPlug: Mozilla (and Chimera at some stage, I assume) does let you do some image blocking, not by regex, but it is good enough for me.

            8)

            /mike

          • I used the IE that came with OS X for a few months (seemed like years since it's so damned slow) then i started using mozilla which was ok except it didn't scroll for shit (resolved in latest version) then i moved on to chimera which i absolutely loved (even though the v. i have still can't download) but now... i say my rosary to OmniWeb. It (almost) makes my iBook have orgasms. Definatly my first choice for a while.

            i'll be damned if i'm going to pay for it, though.
            • i say my rosary to OmniWeb. It (almost) makes my iBook have orgasms. Definatly my first choice for a while.

              i'll be damned if i'm going to pay for it, though.


              I don't mean to make fun, but I'll be damned if this isn't the perfect Slashdot comment. "Loved your software. Use it every day. I'll never pay you for it, ever."

              Sheesh. Some of us make our living writing and selling software, you know. You could be just a little more tactful.
      • I believe that the app in question must be defined programmatically: since it's Carbon apparently it doesn't come for free.

        Although there is an IE service release/update coming soon, or so I heard.
    • This update lets Carbon apps use Quartz text antialiasing, which everybody knows is the very best thing about Quartz.

      errrr... I assume you're referring to ATSUI text rendering [apple.com], which has been available in the Carbon API for quite some time. Apps like Chimera [mozdev.org], a Cocoa version of Navigator that uses Gecko, compile with ATSUI rendering, but apparently not before taking a healthy speed hit.

      So while this has been available to developers for quite a while, not all apps enable it, and from what i've seen, that's chiefly because of speed concerns. Hopefully Apple has gotten on the ball and sped up the ATSUI rendering code, but until Jaguar, when Quartz Extreme offloads everything to a graphics card, we probably won't see any serious speed improvements in antialiased text rendering.
      • errrr... I assume you're referring to ATSUI text rendering, which has been available in the Carbon API for quite some time.

        I'm no Carbon expert, but according to Apple's release notes, 10.1.5 includes support for Quartz text rendering in Carbon apps. I don't know literally what that means, but it's obviously not ATSUI/Carbon, since that was available before 10.1.5.
        • the discrepancy here seems to be that they're trying to market ATSUI quartz rendering versus ATSUI quickdraw rendering. Also important to note that ATSUI != "antialiasing", though that is the most visible result. ATSUI is necessary for OS X to display international characters, which Apple may or may not (i'm not sure) have been rendering with quickdraw prior to this update.

          Apple has been heavily updating its international language support with each subsequent release; it is reasonable to assume that this is more relevant for internationalized versions of OS X.
    • by teridon ( 139550 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2002 @12:58PM (#3645923) Homepage
      At the risk of perpetuating advertising for Unsanity... today I received this email from Unsanity (I use several of their "haxies"):

      Dear friends,

      When we saw MacOS X 10.1.5 out this morning, we got all excited about the ability of Carbon applications to use the native Quartz text rendering for ultra-smooth, antialiased text display. In order to take advantage of this feature, however, every Carbon application needs to be updated .

      "That's not fair" - we thought, so we sat down and wrote a small freeware haxie, called Silk (smooth as silk, get the feeling?). Silk enables the Quartz text rendering and smoothing introduced in Mac OS X 10.1.5 for all Carbon applications. This means antialiased text in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and many others. And if it doesn't look right in some application, you can add it to the Exclude list to get it to the way it looked before.

      So, grab it now:

      http://download.unsanity.com/silk-10.sit

      More information and some pretty screenshots:

      http://www.haxies.com/silk/

      Thank you for your support and participation!
  • my iBook 300 is much faster rendering windows after this update. I ve been waiting for this one.

    I cant wait till 10.2 comes out. that is supposed to be much snappier on slower g3 based systems.

    Thank You apple
    • "Thank You apple"

      While I'm a Mac user, I find this funny. It's like when a retail joint marks everything up 30%, and then has a "massive!! one time!!" sale, everyting 20% off. Consumers, not knowing better, rejoice. Apple gives us a slow OS, and then makes it a little faster, and everyone sings praises.

      Last week, OS 9 ate my HD. So I've been using my NeXT cube- 25 MHz 68040, 24 MB RAM, running NeXTSTEP 3.3. The sad thing is, it feels as fast as my iBook 500 MHz running OS X 10.1.4 most of the times, sometimes faster. So, no, it didn't have to be this way. Alas, it's still good that they're improving it!
  • I have a Powerbook G4 550Mhz with 256MB RAM. I'm not noticing much increases in performance, (a la: bounces on loading, altho iTunes seemed to pop right up, but maybe it's just my perception) but the boot up seemed to take a shorter time, and the login screen looked crisp as hell. Just little touches as far as I can tell. Oh, and I just fired up MS Entourage. (Did not update it to the newest version, as I have a "grey area" copy of it) and the email inbox window seems nice and smoothe with the text, but the actuall message bodies are still jagged.

    I must say tho, that I can always count on looking foward to Apple updates. They always add stuff while fixing things. Never just a fix/patch up holes release. They always sweeten the deal just enough to keep ya comming back for more. Unlike MS updates, which we all dread and regret in some cases....

    Oh, and my friend that has a 700Mhz G3 (yes THREE) iMac is reporting huge performance increases (iTunes loads in one bounce) and says it's friggin awesome. Maybe cause they optimized for the Rage Pro and not the Radeon like my PBook has. Oh well, WHENS JAGUAR GETTING HERE! I want it now, dammit!

    • Sweet stuff inside!
      When you press eject button (F12) you see eject icon on the screen,
      New option in Energy Saver preference, "reduce processor performance" on my iBook.

      Access to iDisk is so much faster, not as fast as Goliath but really fast now.
    • I really don't care about iTunes launching in fewer bounces. They really should decrease the amount of CPU playing an mp3 file requires with iTunes.
      I'm reading 27% cpu as I'm typing this. While it rarely skips on my powerbook G3/400 firewire, I really could use the CPU cycles when I'm compiling stuff with ant...

      Please do not exagerate load times when other performance issues are a lot more important.

      I've run a copy of the Jaguar prerelease and it's much better performance wise in a lot of area's.
      Terminal is just one bounce in 10.2 , which is crucial for us *nix lovers ! Quicktime 6 is a huge improvement over 4 and the finder is much quicker and even more productive with the excellent integrated find !
      Can't wait untill it ships ;-)
  • by tarkin ( 34045 ) on Wednesday June 05, 2002 @08:55AM (#3644176) Homepage
    All powerbook users that use DoubleCommand to turn the useless second enter key into another beware ! 10.1.5 crashes at boot time due to DoubleCommand.

    Delete the folder in your Library/Startup Items folder !!
    • For those unfortunate enough to have installed 10.1.5 without removing DoubleCommand this will probably help you get rid of it.

      I'm not 100% sure on this as I'm not sure when DoubleCommand is loaded... but if it's loaded after user login (and you have login enabled) then you can try logging in as user name '>console'. That will drop you to a console and allow you to delete the folder before aqua is loaded.

      I always keep login enabled just for cases like this where things could mess up.
      • No , DoubleCommand is loaded before your machine reaches the loginwindow. So you can never login.
        Because I booted into Jaguar and removed the folder that way, I can't say this works. But if DoubleCommand doesn't get loaded when booting in single usermode this will certainly work:

        The only way to fix it is to boot in single user mode using holding cmd-s while booting. And then remove the folder in /Library/StartupItems/DoubleCommand.

        See this [macosxhints.com] page for more boot and startup commands :
  • Just a reminder to all OS X users: 10.1.5 is rumored to be the last no-cost upgrade to OS X. 10.2 (Jaguar) will be a pay-to-play upgrade per Steve Jobs [macrumors.com].
  • by elliotj ( 519297 ) <slashdot&elliotjohnson,com> on Wednesday June 05, 2002 @09:47AM (#3644445) Homepage
    My tsch prompt in the terminal has changed. I'm pretty sure it's b/c of this update.

    When I launch my terminal.app this the prompt:
    [elliot\032johnson\226\149\146s\032comput er:~] elliotj%

    but if I "pwd", it reports that I'm at:
    /Users/elliotj

    Wierd. Any ideas?
    • Re:One wierd change (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      yep. Looks like you have some characters encoded in Octal (the \### sequences).

      Notice that if you convert them, it'll say
      [elliot johnson's computer:~] elliotj%

      which is the name of your computer, followed by the current directory (~), which is equal to /Users/elliotj/, followed by your username.

      if you don't want it to say "elliot johnson's computer", then you can rename it in the Sharing Preferences panel under System Preferences.

      but this change isn't really a change at all - I've had a similar prompt (sans login) on all OS X versions, including 10.1.5.
  • Just want to add that my Sawtooth 400 with Adaptec SCSI 2906 now hibernates!

    There was a problem in previous versions where (if I recall correctly) the OS didn't know what to do about supplying power to SCSI PCI cards when the system tried to hibernate, so they just disabled the feature. With the upgade to 10.1.5 it now goes into a deep sleep, which is a big improvement!

  • The 10.1.5 update both fixes and BREAKS support for the Radeon 7000 PCI cards.

    An incompatibility with Beige G3 systems has been corrected but now the video gets scrambled [obzorg.org] when the system wakes from sleep.
  • If you use qmail [qmail.org] and OS X, note that this upgrade will reinstall the sendmail binary over whatever symbolic link you might have had pointing to qmail. It doesn't start up sendmail, but apps/scripts using /bin/mail-like sending will stop working.

    This is a problem on FreeBSD as well - every upgrade reinstalls sendmail. It may be a popular MTA, but it's not the only one out there in wide use on these OSes.

  • by danamania ( 540950 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @10:47AM (#3652350)
    ...is that it's still not running on my Quadras.

    (back to recompiling darwin on 68k for me... 3 months & seventeen days and gcc's STILL going...)

    a grrl & her server [danamania.com]
  • I have spent the last 2 Months writing Image files using toast in OS X then writing them in OS 9 which is a pain in the ass! (created Desktop folders when viewed in X)

    I have been emailing Iomega support and bitching about the lack of drivers

    Installed the update, and toast now sees the Iomega drive in OS X

    Happy Happy Joy Joy!!

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