iCal and Power PC / 10.5 leopard, 5 days to the end to push notifications!

So long and thanks for all the fish! In Apple’s eternal quest for your money, they are continuing their disrespect for Mac OS 10.5 Leopard users less than two years after 10.6 came on to the market.  forcing you to upgrade your OS at an increasing pressure rate that would make Microsoft blush.

In seven days, Mobile Me will no longer support iCal push to Leopard clients. F*** the What?

I run a shed load of Power PC macs which refuse to die…. And their OS was only superseded only in June 2009, less than two years ago… At which point all updates ceased abruptly, with only security patches from that point on.

I always remembered the adage…. “You don’t need a new PC because the old one will always continue to do what it always has done…”

Bah humbug. Not any more… With the cloud centred life that we are all starting to live, they can rescind anything they want at any time…. And with MobileMe, they’re doing just that… already…

Is Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac just revenge for the travesty that is Quicktime for Windows?

I’ve reported here on Office:Mac 2008 being the worst version of Office ever released for any platform. It’s buggy, runs slower than the previous version runs in emulation and it still lacks database software and is also missing Visual Basic, a key feature for any serious Excel user. In a word. Office:Mac 2008 is a lemon, and I want my money back.

But if you really, no, I mean REALLY want to talk about crap software produced by a world class company for another world class company’s operating system, then let’s not beat around the bush.

Quicktime for Windows is a dog. It’s an old dog, a mangy, old, lame dog which you just can’t seem to have put down despite serious, room filling flatulence.

It’s slow, buggy and is missing lots of features that many serious media users find indispensable.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes blogging for ZD-Net has shown that Quicktime on his old 512MB RAM Mac Mini on OS X outperforms his 8GB Quad Core Vista system.

Ah, Vista, I hear you say. But before you click the reply button, he states that using VLC or a real media player blows the Mini to smithereens, so it is a Quicktime for Windows issue.

So I’d make that a 1-1 Apple-Microsoft draw.

How to fix the ARD toolbar buttons/functions missing from Screen Sharing under OS X 10.5.5

I’d like to thank a couple of my readers for telling me how to remedy the problem of the ARD Screen Sharing toolbar function hack that can no longer be applied once one upgrades to OS X 10.5.5.

The solution is glaringly obvious and I’m a bit annoyed I didn’t spot it myself.

Just use Time Machine and search for the Screen Sharing application, located in /System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app and return to an older version of the app!

You gotta love Apple for handing you the solution on a plate.

Alternatively, dig out your Leopard DVD and pull it off there.

You’ll apparently get bugged by an upgrade screen.

I had read that Apple were trying to cut down on “Frankenbuilds” using software from different versions of the OS, but I guess this is still OK.

I’d like to try this, but since I have a nice, fully functional ARD 3.2 installed there’s not much point for me!

Still, I may try it one day. Let me know how you get on with these tips.

My iMac 24″ goes back for inspection / a chance to play with Tiger

My iMac has gone back to Apple for an inspection and hopefully, a new screen.

I backed up my 24″ iMac using Time Machine and formatted and secure erased the HDD, reinstalled the factory supplied Tiger install before sending it back to Apple.

Just for old time’s sake, and just scientific curiosity, I played with the Tiger installation (10.4.9) for an hour or two before switching it off and shipping it back.

I’ll state my final impression right up:

I could not believe how much progress Leopard has made and how much a retrograde step it was moving back to Tiger!

There, I said it. For all the (all the? a bit of an overstatement, perhaps, when compared to Vista) bad press that Leopard received, Tiger is a bit of a dog to use compared to Leopard for all the things I tend to do, and I have gained a new level of respect for the newest, occasionally troubled OS.

Finder

The old sidebar is much less useful than the new one, and the dynamically scaling icons to fit extra stuff in appears a bit unnecessary. As for speed. Crikey, it was much slower than I remembered, often beachballing when performing a task.

Networking

It seems that every time I double clicked on a network share the computer would beachball. How did I live with that?

Then up would come the prompt for the computer I was connecting to. After entering the password, The drive mount selector would appear. I’d double click on that only to have the icon mount on the desktop, the finder.

Repeat for each mount and with eight mounts, things start to get out of hand!

Tiresome, tedious and not at all intuitive.

Then there’s the strange Network icon that appear with an alias to my server that when you click on it throw an error saying the original file cannot be found etc. etc. do I want to fix it…

Stability

As for stability, I’d forgotten how finicky the Disk Utility was when it came to mounting my four drive raid combi on Firewire. It locked up immediately and permanently on opening and preventing me from logging out. It then required me to forcibly turn off the computer and restart, with the Firewire drive switched off.

Nearly a year after launch, Leopard is rock solid. OK, so a few apps have memory leaks, but I can now leave my Leopard Server running 24/7 only restarting for updates and patches.

There was some good bits to Tiger though

The lighter, more translucent appearance of Tiger was fresh and bright, like an Apple Store, after the dull grey of Leopard and the blue apple and rounded corners of the menu bar are much softer and more gentle.

Also, shadows subtly handled in Tiger, with delicate, subtle shadows rather than the the crazy-arsed SHADOW!!! that surrounds each window in Leopard.

There was less memory usage off the bat.

The Calendar application had its sticky inspector panel, which required only one click to edit each entry. The thrice damned Leopard Calendar drives me up the wall! Bring back the drawer is what I say!

All in all, I’d give Tiger a respectable 8 and Leopard a superb 9 out of 10!

 

OS X 10.5.3 Update breaks Time Machine backup with “cannot mount volume” error

I am using Leopard Server and was happily backing up to a Leopard Client. (Yes, my server is backing up to a Firewire mounted external volume on an OS X client machine, shared over ethernet with AFP!!)

After months of trouble free operation, I upgraded both to 10.5.3 and got the “cannot mount volume” error.

I tried several times, but it would time out with an exclamation mark icon after a few minutes, each time.

• I switched off Time Machine
• Disabled file sharing on the client
• Reset the Client
• Switched AFP sharing back on
• Manually mounted the .sparsebundle once on the server – It mounted fine.
• I then reenabled Time Machine, ran the “backup now” option.

In my case, the above steps fixed the problem. I now have hourly backups working again.

Installing old ATI Rage Pro 128 video drivers from Tiger into Leopard on G4 Cube

Seeing the graphics benchmark results for Leopard being so slow, I got to wondering if it was the drivers which were affecting the performance. Perhaps the old ATI was unrecognised by Leopard.

First I checked the system profile on the Apple menu, but that showed that the graphics card was correctly recognised as ATI Rage Pro 128

Just in case, I checked the /System/Library/Extensions folder. There were no ATI Rage drivers there at all!

I hopped on over to OSX86 at Insanely Mac and read their forums, remembering my Hackintosh days of dragging drivers over and found that it was a trivial task.

Since I used Archive and Install so I had my whole Previous System folder available, I mosied on over to:

/Previous Systems/<somedate>/System/Library/Extensions

and grabbed all the ATIRage kexts bundles and plugins I could find.  I spotted the ATIcellerator, too so I brought that over to/System/Library/Extensions folder, also.

I had to change the permissions of the files, delete the old extensions cache and reboot.

This needs to be done as root (using sudo) so be careful, a mistyped command will be executed without complaint by your computer, potentially hosing your entire system.

In terminal, type:

sudo -s

type your password at the prompt and you are now root. You can seriously shag your system up if you’re not careful. So be careful 🙂

chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRage*.*
rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions.mkext
reboot

After the reboot I found that my system was much, and I mean that honestly, more responsive! The slow screen updates, windows resizes, dragging, Safari page scrolling, everything was much faster.

I imediately ran X Bench to see if the results reflected the performance differences I felt and here are the results:

 

A convincing win for Leopard with the Tiger driver installed! It is a shame that OpenGL performance is not affected, however.

Just to remind us, let’s have a look at Leopard running with Tiger’s ATI driver versus Tiger itself.

This is extremely interesting. It shows us surprisingly that far from having an overhead, Quartz graphics actually show a very slight increase in performance compared to Tiger (averaged over three runs)! Of course, X bench is fickle, so take this with a pinch of salt.

Unfortuantely, the OpenGL (spinning squares) test shows us that it not receiving any benefit from the new driver. That’s too bad.

Well, I can now reverse my original post with the following shout:

I CAN NOW HEARTILY RECOMMEND LEOPARD FOR ATI RAGE USERS WITH >1GB RAM AND A DECENT CPU!

Leopard Benchmarks G4 Cube – It’s not pretty!

I benchmarked my Leopard on G4 Cube installation this morning and the results are not pretty. As I mentioned yesterday, the system feels sluggish, especially the UI. Although many feel that X Bench is not very representive, I feel that the results bear out my experiences very well as you can see in the chart below:

It’s basically a clean sweep for Tiger, with a couple of statistically irrelevant results in favour of Leopard.

Note the far left column is X Benche’s overall result which shows a 50% decline!!! This is in line with my impression that day to day use is about half as fast as it was under Tiger.

Key areas to note are the OpenGL and UI sections which have lost almost 70% of their performance while Quartz is about half the speed!

This clearly shows that Leopard users pay a heavy price in the graphics department with older hardware. It looks to me that the system is using generic drivers for the ATI card, since all other results vary by mostly insignificant margins.

Full benchmark results

The only major differences in benchmark scores other than graphics are Memory allocation speed which is doubled (tested repeatedly) and thread lock contention which is about 30% slower.

 

Installed Leopard on Power Mac G4 Cube

I bit another bullet yesterday and installed Leopard on my newly updated G4 Cube.

To recap, my Cube has:

• PowerLogix 7447A 1.5GHz CPU
• 1.25GB 133 MHz 2-2-2 RAM
• 160Gb Single Platter Hitachi HDD

Procedure

I booted with CMD+OPT+O+F and ran the NVRAM Open Firmware hack to enable the >128Gb LBA48 in the firmware. Detailed here: http://lloydie.homeip.net/blog/?p=182

After a Reboot, Leopard installed straight onto the Cube without need for the CPU hack, seamlessly recognizing the 7447A as a PowerPC 60? (1.1)

I was given the option of installing to either my first 128Gb partition or the small partition at the end of the disk, so I’m presuming that that the Open Firmware hack was successful.

Before I knew of the hack, I was unable to see the last part of the disk with any OS installer CD.

I ran an Archive and Install. This is the first time I’ve ever done that, since I usually just delete and install. But this machine is being used at work, so speed was of the essence.

I’ve been using it for about five hours now, so this is a really short first impression.

Applications and User Data

Most user applications seem to be intact. Interestingly, even the dock’s position has been maintained and is on the right, just where I left it. It has identical icons plus a few special Leopard ones.

System Applications were gone, of course but preference panes were still there.

There was no PHP or MySQL which I had to set up again. That took some time, since the http://entropy.ch Marc Liyanage PPC build of PHP 5.2.4 is bugged and cannot authenticate via mysql or mysqli extensions and I had to backtrack, at first thinking my MySQL 5.1 Beta was at fault.

Stability

Fine. Nothing to report yet. Had a crash the first time the system booted with my Wacom Pen Driver, but that crash never reoccurred.

Performance

Now to the section that everyone’s been waiting for, the Performance.

Performance is a mixed bag. Generally OK but as suspected, the poor 16MB ATI Rage Pro is definitely struggling mightily.

• UI intensive tasks are noticeably slower. Window dragging is jerkier than it was under Tiger. Resizes and scrolls require serious CPU power and more time than under Tiger.
• Screen refreshes are occuring munch more slowly, in fact, I get the impression that they are about 10~15 frames per second. Quite poor, especially noticable when dragging or moving large chunks of screen real estate around.

• Finder and Spotlight are eye openers. They are both significantly faster than under Tiger. This mitigates the speed issues somewhat, and so I’d say it’s just south of a draw.

Boot and Login is noticably slower. I get the impression that application first launches are also slower, but once the apps are up and running, everything is sweet.

Other stuff, such as network, application launch times, response speed and so on don’t seem to have been much affected.

DVD player is no longer available and nor is VLC or iTunes coverflow. I haven’t tried Time Machine but know it doesn’t work so there’s no point. Remote Desktop (VNC) from the Cube over the internet to my Mac at home suffers from the graphics issues, just like everything else. The screen updates are blocky and irregular.

I’m running a my Cube with a PHP 5 and a MySQL install as an Intranet Wikki Server with Web Based Group Task Management software. This has not been affected. Apple’s built in PHP build is rock solid and except for lack of GD and MCRYPT, seems fine.

Still, I do get the impression that the poor machine is nearing its limit for terminal use. It feels tired and there is a small element of frustration in using it. Overall, the system is definitely less snappy than it was under Tiger.

For example, under Tiger with the 1.5GHz CPU I really had the impression of a perfectly usable computer, but with Leopard, the computer feels its age. The UI is a drag when doing anything other than using Word or Excel. I can live with it, but I miss Tiger already.

To be honest, it’s not surprising when you remember that the Power Mac G4 Cube originally shipped with OS9, that’s seven generations of OS on a single machine! Way to go Apple!

Bear in mind that many mainstream PC’s that used XP have failed to run but a single update to their OS and cannot run Vista!

So, in a nutshell…

How is the performance?

As a server? Peachy. The built in PHP5 is solid.
As a terminal? Not so good. I’m frankly a bit disappointed with the graphics performance which impacs UI and hence day to day usability.

Can I recommend Leopard on the G4 Cube?

I do feel that Leopard with a 1.5GHz CPU is more usable than Tiger with a stock 450MHz CPU, but not by much. I’d stick with Tiger unless you have a need to use Leopard’s latest features for application compaitibity or otherwise.

As soon as I have the X Bench scores and the application launch benchmarks, I’ll let you all know, but I feel that UI things have about halved in speed.

Directly Install a shop copy of Leopard on an iMac 700MHz (or even a stock, unmodified G4 Cube!)

Yes, despite Leopard being limited to 867MHz G4 processors and faster, you can pretty much install Leopard on any G4 Mac with an AGP graphics card. (OK, so the picture above is a phtoshopped image of a 1GHz model, but you get the idea.)

So, I decided to try it out and reinstall Leopard from scratch on my shiny “new” iMac with its rip-roaring 700MHz processor, 40GB hard disk and 640MB RAM.

To cut a long story short, it can be done and ridiculously easily!

• Reboot the iMac
• Hold down the Cmd-Opt-O-F keys. Instead of the usual white screen and grey Apple logo, you’ll get a black screen with a white Open Firmware prompt.
• This is NOT a regular BASH prompt, so don’t be tempted to try anything!
• Insert the shop copy of the Leopard DVD. (If it’s already in the drive, that’s fine, too).
• Type the following lines in exactly as shown below. After pressing Return, you should see “ok” to signify that the command was understood. If at any time you have any doubt, just reset the Mac and start again since these settings are cleared after a reboot.

For your iMac, G4 Cube etc, type this:

dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
boot cd:,\\:tbxi

• The install will continue.

I haven’t tried this below, but…
If you have a dual CPU computer, use the following:

dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@1
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
boot cd:,\\:tbxi

• The install will continue.

Remember this hint does not confer any magical speed increase, it just lies to the Installer! Also, a reboot clears this tweak, But Leopard will continue to run, once installed.

Obvious point but… If you install a new OS, you’ll in all likelihood LOSE SOME OR ALL OF THE CONTENTS OF THE DRIVE. BACKUP FIRST!

Installing Leopard on iMac 700MHz with Target Disk Mode

I’ve seen a lot of talk about Leopard requiring the latest system just to get it running. So I’m writing to put that myth to sleep.

So, I decided to upgrade the RAM and the OS to either Tiger or Leopard and test the machine with original 40GB hard disk and just an additional 512MB upgrade (for a total of 640MB). If it ran Leopoard tolerably fast and stable enough then I’d make Leopard permanent and upgrade to the the full 1GB RAM, a Bigger Hard disk and a DVD-R, which should provide even better performance. If not then I’d fall back to Tiger rather than Leopard.

Preparing the iMac for the Leopard install.

This was trivial and involved adding a 512MB, 133MHz SODIMM RAM module.

    See the Upgrading the iMac’s RAM to 640 MB post.

• Next, I rebooted the iMac and tested the memory. All was well.

• Restart the iMac in Firewire Target Disk mode by holding down T until a few seconds after the chime.
• I used Firewire target disk mode and CCC to clone the HDD off Tomoko’s 12″ PowerBook Leopard install. This took about an hour for the 10GB or so transfer.

Booted up fine, first time.

Gotchas

After removing various settings for Bluetooth, Airmac and changing the network settings so as not to double up with the PowerBook, I got to work testing.

I was surprised at the performance, expecting it to be slower than it was and the 1024 x 768 screen to be more cramped. But it runs quite well. I tried Safari, Word, Excel and Mail at the same time (a typical day’s work) and found the machine to be pleasant and entirely usable if not amazingly fast. There were none of the annoyances that I have with Tiger on my stock G4 Cube, for example.

I found that the 10.5.2 system install was waiting so I installed that plus graphics update 1.0 and a few other queued updates.

Probably subjective, but I found the whole thing to be even smoother and more responsive. For example, clicking on the finder icon in the dock brings up any open finder windows almost instantaneously over whatever you’re doing at the time.

A lot better than my stock cube with 1.5GB RAM and Tiger.

I’d like to test it out with Tiger for a speed comparison, but quite frankly, besides the lack of awaking from sleep, it’s running so smooth that I don’t see the point.

In conclusion

• Install from cloned PowerBook HDD using CCC was effortless and took an hour or so for a 10GB install. 
• Leopard runs trouble free, with so far no crashes or random stuff happening (apart from wake from sleep).
• 10.5.2 upgrade and Graphics Update 1.0 work wonderfully.
• 640MB RAM and 40GB HDD gives more than adequate performance for Surfing, iTunes, Office 2004 multitasking.

Remaining Niggles:

1. Awakes from sleep with screen artifacts (but at least it can be gracefully reset since the OSX10.5.2 / GU1.0 updates).
2. Boot up is slow. Haven’t timed it, but it’s slow.
3. Logging in is slow.

Of the above complaints, only the first is a real one, since, once logged in, everything is hunky dory.

I think I’ll keep the machine like this for a week or to so that I can appreciate the upgrade when I perform it.

I wonder how much faster the Seagate 500GB HDD and extra 386MB of RAM will make it…