Leopard Roundup
October 29th, 2007 by admin
Ok, so I’ve obviously been doing a lot of Leopard posts. I’ll try to round things up here.
I should say that if you’re upgrading, uninstall unsanity’s “application enhancer” and be advised that it may be installed by some other utility you use – I think it appears as a preference pane if it’s installed. Old versions seem to cause some problems with Leopard. I stay away from things like Application Enhancer for this reason. Oh, the Logitech Control Center foolishly installs APE and so you may have it without knowing it. I have never installed any 3rd party mouse drivers – I just plug in their mice and it works so I never knew what the drivers would do.
Personally, I think Leopard is a great upgrade. As John Gruber pointed out, it’s almost a death by 1000 cuts approach. Yeah, there are big new features like Time Machine and Spaces but there are lots of small improvements in a lot of ways. The new Network system preference pane, the new Software Update (with a “not now” option for restarts). The most comprehensive review (which still doesn’t touch on everything new) is of course John Siracusa’s at Ars Technica, which also talks about the additional abilities added for developers.
Time Machine makes it absurdly easy for backing up, even with a laptop. Every time I plug in the firewire drive Time Machine immediately starts churning and does a backup and it usually is over in a few minutes. I thought Synk was easy but this is even easier. I like the data detectors ability in Mail for adding events to iCal. Spotlight is much faster. I’m starting to miss features from Leopard when I come to work to my Mac Pro so … that’s usually a good sign. However, stacks are annoying (especially since the icon for a folder in the dock now can be especially meaningless and indistinguishable).
The biggest problem to astronomers is that all this X11 business is annoying for those of us who use X11 a lot. I think in the long term this move to a new codebase, etc. will be positive but for now, for me, the problem with no full screen X11 is a deal breaker. I’m going to try the revert-to-Tiger X11 tonight and see how that works. Hopefully, we’ll see improvements to X11.app shortly in Leopard itself. If you don’t use Leopard full screen, there are still some things are still buggy in Leopard. Namely, there seem to problem with the “Application” menu, an xterm always launches, and some programs (like ds9) don’t like the DISPLAY variable trickery that X11.app now uses. And, X11 doesn’t seem to play nicely with Spaces.
However, the upside is that you can use the Terminal.app to launch x11 programs now without weird crashes about DISPLAY not found or whatever. I think eventually this will go well, but for now Leopard’s X11 has some problem. I wish they had just held back on the changes until everything was up and running.
So, if you’re in the middle of some X11-intensive project, I wouldn’t go buy Leopard and install it today, as you may encounter some unexpected bumps. I put Leopard on my Macbook which pretty much does no IRAF or IDL these days so my astronomical productivity is unaffected.
Tags: apple, Leopard, OS X — .
Jessica Says
I am just curious as to why everyone uses X11 full screen? Are there particular X11 astronomy applications that need this? Mostly, I use the Terminal app and X11 is only there for display purposes for PyRAF, etc.
In my .cshrc file in Tiger I use some script trickery to set the DISPLAY parameter correctly in Terminal. Anyone have any idea if this is going to work in Leopard with all the changes to how DISPLAY gets set?
[ duplicate message to that in "X11 Full Screen" ]
Oct 31st, 2007 at 6:52 pm
Marcos Says
I would argue most people probably don’t use X11 full screen. I seem to be in the minority there and I just prefer it and use the enlightenment window manager and have just gotten used to that setup.
The new X11 in Leopard actually handles all the DISPLAY stuff on its own so with the exception of DS9, should not require you to do any “script trickery” to get the Terminal to launch X11 programs. In fact, I think you have to make sure you don’t set DISPLAY yourself for Leopard x11 to work.
I think the other problems in Leopard x11 are … the application menu, some sort of yellow cursor bug and … well that other poster on a different post talked about low bandwidth X or something like … I don’t know, I only use X11 remotely over ssh so I’m not exactly sure how much bandwidth that’s using.
I encourage those who are really interested in all these issues to check out the x11-users list at Apple, which … I linked to somewhere but not so much to the subscribe page…. hmm
Oct 31st, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Erin Says
Not that too many people will be worried but with astro deadlines coming up:
The Spot and Leopard programs from Spitzer (observation planning/proposal tool and archive interfaces respectively) do not work with OS X Leopard due to a java issue. The Sppitzer proposal deadline is Nov 16th, so those who want to propose and only have a Mac based system at their disposal should stick to Tiger.
(and yes I’m a crazy who uses full screen for x11 but that’s just a personal preference to be able to watch all the IRAF messages scroll by as it chugs on my data.)
Nov 1st, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Marcos Says
Yikes, thanks for the note. I had heard mixed things about Java in Leopard – some said it was bad; others said it worked quite well. I didn’t have Spot or Leopard on my Macbook so I didn’t test it on Leopard (just on my Mac Pro.) I’m going to go ahead about post a story on this.
Nov 1st, 2007 at 2:31 pm