10.4 notes

[kpreid]

Installed Mac OS X 10.4 last night. Miscellany that I can remember this morning:

• The installer no longer offers separate Custom Install settings for whatever-the-fonts-for-many-languages-package-was-called and Additional Asian Fonts, but only one. I wonder if it’s just all in one now, or the A.A.F. are in the base system or not provided any more.

• I clicked on Safari. Safari loaded, started showing a page, crashed. The Crash Reporter dialog now has a button to relaunch the application. If it crashes again, the dialog offers to relaunch it with the preference file moved aside. If it crashes again, the “Report” button becomes the default. (Still no apparent hooks for reporting a crash to anyone but Apple.)

  I got it to not crash after launch by copying the plist entry (ack, plists are now binary by default!) from my 10.3 system that says “start up with blank page”. Trying various web pages, and setting up a WebView in Interface Builder, seems to indicate that WebKit crashes whenever a GIF (not PNG, not JPEG) image is present on a page.

  I haven’t seen any other reports of this problem yet. Hmm.

• Looking at Console indicates that a “mdimporter” process is crashing about once a minute (and accumulating crash logs). I understand this is the Spotlight indexing process.
• Dashboard has plenty of Gratuitous Visual Effects, and works as described, but I haven’t yet seen anything obvious that I’ll be using it for.
• Safari is said to support viewing PDFs in-browser, but I haven’t tried this yet. I’m looking forward to it.
• Audio MIDI Setup had something called “Network” in the MIDI device configuration section.
• I should turn on speech recognition and see if it’s become less crashy.
• My computer still won’t wake from sleep properly on this clean-installed system. This means it’s probably a hardware problem. Aargh.

Comments

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

My computer still won’t wake from sleep properly on this clean-installed system. This means it’s probably a hardware problem. Aargh.

Is this a new G5? I've been having a problem something like that.

Sleep problem details

[kpreid.livejournal.com]

No, it's a PowerBook G4 12", latest revision (scrolling trackpad).

It goes to sleep normally. On wakeup the light goes out and the drives make the usual noises, but the screen remains off (not blank, and not backlight-off-but-showing-an-image). The one time I tried network access, SSH just hung and ping reported, IIRC, “Host is down”.

It didn’t do this when I first got it, but I didn’t put it to sleep for a while after that so I didn’t notice exactly when it started doing this.

My plan is to ask about this in comp.sys.mac.portables (news:comp.sys.mac.portables), and then look into service under warranty.