So, if anyone out there has installed Leopard and X11, could you leave a comment if you can enable full screen mode and then successfully “Toggle Full Screen?” The menu item becomes active when I enable the option in preferences and restart X11, but when I choose it simply does nothing when I try it. So, I’m stuck in non-full-screen mode. I don’t know if this is a bug in Leopard or just a problem I’m having.
It’s happening in both my user accounts though.
Update – More on X11 So, Apple has apparently changed more than a few things about X11. For example, if you know type “xterm” in the regular Apple terminal it won’t crap out and give a “can’t get to display error” but it launches X11 and runs the xterm. That’s cool. But, the full screen thing problem persists.
Update II They’re also doing some weird mojo on the DISPLAY variable, it’s set to something like /tmp/launch-onrFOA/:0 and that confused the heck of out ds9. I was able to fix it by setting to display to :0.0 like … well, it normally would be.
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So, I installed Leopard about 5 hours ago or so, and here are just random initial reactions on my white Macbook (Core 2 Duo).
Updated at the bottom
- Installation took about an hour but I had no foreign language installations (thanks to Monolingual) so it didn’t update them – I think that saves a lot of time.
- Quicklook only works with iWork ’08 docs.
- New screensavers are kind of neat (Mosaic option on photo album based screensavers)
- Spotlight reindexes upon install (~1 hour for me)
- AFP disconnect problem at long last solved (only took 6 years! No more spinning arrow for 10 minutes when an Appleshare volume is mounted and you accidentally leave the network.)
- Emptying trash from dock shows warning – this never used to happen even when the option to warn was set it Finder preferences.
- The new preview is nice – group search results by page (no more 10 results all on the same page) and some more annotation features.
- Lame – No netinfo manager. This means I no longer know how to change the a) shell, b) home directory location for a user. I did an upgrade and it still knows I use tcsh so … there must be some way but not with Netinfo manager. Updated You can now do this in the account preference pane.
- X11 Toggle Full Screen not working. This is troubling, I assume it’s a bug or a bad config file but I can’t get X11 to enter full screen mode, though it’s enabled. The command simply does nothing.
- Where’s the new applescript language guide? This still says updated 1999. That’s rubbish.
- Automator seems better but … could just be I never looked at it thoroughly. I made a nice iPhoto->Zip archive workflow that works nicely.
- It appears to install iTunes 7.4.2
- I’m just now testing out Time Machine. I wish it had a “only back up home folder or this folder or that folder” option rather than a “back up everything but exclude this or that” option.
- Dashcode could be cool. Xcode is on the disc – I’m not sure how new the compilers and such are.
- I like the new print preview in print dialogs. Macworld has a nice hidden features
That’s all for now. I wonder how long until Fink releases a new point release and the headache that usually is.
I haven’t actually installed IRAF on this machine… I’ll do that over the weekend. I’d be very surprised if anything broke though. Except the X11 full screen thing I already mentioned but most of you probably use the Quartz-wm anyway.
Update Juan Cabanela reports that you can change shell and home directory location, etc. in the accounts preference pane which you can read about at Macworld.
Tags: Leopard, OS X — .
This Leopard review points out something that has troubled me since I first heard of Time Machine:
Unfortunately, Time Machine has a serious problem: there is no way (that I can find) to remove a file from a Time Machine backup. This is a pretty glaring omission. After all, Leopard has a “secure empty trash” feature that lets you throw away files so that they can’t be recovered with forensic tools. What’s the point of erasing a file on the hard drive and then overwriting the disk sectors seven times if Leopard is going to keep a copy of the file in the Time Machine backup?
Agreed. It seems like while handy to have backups, sometimes you just want a file totally gone. Though, I store anything sensitive (like financial items, etc.) on an encrypted disk image. However, if Time Machine is backing things up every hour – it could grab such a file before one has time to copy to a secure disk image. So, while you can turn Time Machine off for specific folders, etc – it’d still be nice to have some way to obliterate all copies of a file from the past, as well as the future.
You can delete all backups though I doubt they’re done “securely” with overwrites. See below.
Tags: backup software, security, time machine — .
