|
|
|
Leopard Review: BugsBy Francine Schwieder |
Gotchas: The Great Group Goof
If you do an upgrade install or an archive and install with preserve user settings, or even an erase and install with immediate migration from your Tiger partition, you may have strange problems with a number of different things, due to the fact that group:username (GID 501, for the original first admin account) has been dropped in favor of a return to sanity, the admin user is now a member of group:staff (GID 20). But your original files will now show as belonging to group:(unknown), and, depending on what install method you followed, you yourself may be unknown.
The problems resulting from this SNAFU are many and various, and new ones turn up every day in Apple Discussions. In my case, having done an upgrade install, I discovered that none of the files in my home directory that showed group unknown were being indexed by Spotlight. People who want to share a folder by altering the permissions discover they can't, and that the Finder crashes when they try--they click the lock so they can change something, manage to figure out they need to click the + button, do so, and Finder crashes. New files get saved as group unknown. Some people have to enter their admin password to do anything with their own files, whether save or move or trash. Some programs announce that they are getting an error when attmpting to write their preference file.
If you bring up the Accounts pane in System Prefs, unlock, and right click on your name in the left hand pane, you get advanced options, including one to assign yourself to Group ID 20 (staff). If you do that, and you then check in Terminal using the "id" command, you should see this:
NoobiX:~ francine$ id
uid=501(francine) gid=20(staff) groups=20(staff),98(_lpadmin),101(com.apple.sharepoint.group.1),81(_appserveradm),79(_appserverusr),80(admin)
Thus it appears you are now a member of the Staff group. However if you query the Directory Services cache about members of the group staff, it seems you aren't:
NoobiX:~ francine$ dscacheutil -q group -a name francine
name: francine
password: *
gid: 501
According to the cache I am still a member of the Tiger standard group francine, with the group id number of 501. That's the very group id number that Leopard Finder is incorrectly reporting as unknown (which is really incorrect, since there actually is a real defined unknown group, it has the official GID of 99, not 501).
And if you ask for a list of members of the staff group, it again appears you aren't:
NoobiX:~ francine$ dscacheutil -q group -a name staff
name: staff
password: *
gid: 20
users: root revelator
The members of the staff group are root and the test account I made after I had installed Leopard: revelator. In other words, an account created de novo in Leopard, not migrated from Tiger, is correctly assigned to the staff group.
Furthermore, when you save things they show up as belonging to "unknown" rather than staff, but this behavior is quite variable. Sometimes, in some programs, they will be staff, in others unknown, and sometimes the same program will save as one, then later as the other. This seems to depend on whether the file takes a trip thru some obscure temp folder deep inside /private/var/folders, where in an Upgrade install at least the group remains private rather than staff.
And if you attempt to fix the group using the new Sharing&Permissions section of GetInfo by unlocking, give your password (why you have to do this on files that belong to you to start with is a mystery), then click the + button (and why a plus button rather than a drop down list as was the case in Tiger and is still the case in the privileges section is also beyond my grasp), the Finder crashes.
I never did manage to get this all straightened out, despite using many and various Terminal commands to get myself and all my files to be part of the staff group, and to add the francine group to the official list of real groups so it would no longer show, erroneously, as unknown, and so that any stray file I missed would belong to a real group, of which I was a member. Indeed I no longer remember everything I did, and in the end things still weren't quite right--while my files did finally get indexed by Spotlight and everything seemed OK, many new files I created still turned up as group unknown. I finally cloned that install to a spare drive, then did erase and install and used the installer's migration assistent to move all my stuff from the clone. Even that didn't turn out quite right (everyone in the world could read things in my home folder, I have no idea why), so I fixed that with a few Terminal commands. I think everything is now OK, at any rate all my files are indexed, nothing seems to be turning up as belonging to unknown, things are saving properly, and I can access and use everything, and my test user can longer read everything in my regular account.
But I've become convinced that the only way to get it right and avoid problems is do an erase and install, then create a new account and redo all your settings and preferences. Install your programs from scratch, and copy your data from your backup drive. Things you copy come in belonging to the user and group doing the copying.
If you want to read more about these issues, you can. See these sometimes acrimonious threads at Apple Discussions:
Leopard - File Permissions | ACLs | User Group issue - not fully resolved
Updated to 10.5.1 - issues with user's group & file permissions not solved
How to Fix the Unknown Group (Permissions)
You'll notice quite a number of technically rather savvy people discussing the issues, and that they often do not agree with each other. They sometimes even disagree rather strongly. As I said, I finally decided the only way to get it working correctly was an erase and install. If you are an average Mac user I suspect you will agree. I use the Terminal for something or other almost every day, and the issues in the Group Goof make my head spin and my stomach feel a bit queasy. I had never ever wanted to learn how to use the chgrp, chown and chmod commands. I am not happy that I had to learn how anyway.
Gotchas: Dual Booting and Spotlight
If you want to dual boot Leopard and Tiger you are going to have a problem. Evidently the Tiger and Leopard Spotlights are mutually incompatible (see HERE), and each will put its own index and over-write the other's stuff every time. So if you boot into Tiger, the Tiger Spotlight will mess up the Leopard's index. When you reboot into Leopard it discovers this and promptly reindexes. If you want to dual boot and notice that Spotlight is reindexing every time you boot then this is the problem, and you are really in a quandry. Here's the way it looks to me:
A. Booted in Tiger, if you add the Leopard drive to Privacy, a note will be written to the drive that Spotlight is off, so when you reboot into Leopard Spotlight will either read that note and not work, or simply conclude that its files are messed up and reindex. Neither option is good.
B. If you leave the Leopard drive indexable in Tiger, it will be reindexed by Tiger, over-writing Leopard's Spotlight scheme, and when you reboot into Leopard it will reindex itself.
I decided, since I am mainly running in Leopard right now, that the only thing to do was disable Spotlight completely on Tiger. There are several ways to do this (Google the topic), I edited the hostconfig file on Tiger and turned Spotlight off. Of course, that means when I'm booted into Tiger and want to find something I have to use either locate or find in Terminal, or use EasyFind, and, of course, I have to remember that Spotlight is off, something I tend to forget until I see the spinning ball and no results. Then I remember. But at least my Leopard Spotlight is working correctly and not being forced to reindex.
Gotchas: GUID Format
If you have an Intel machine the Time Machine drive should be formatted with the GUID partition table, not just Mac OS X Extended on an Apple Partition Map type drive. And if you want a bootable clone you also need to reformat. It isn't obvious what is going on, nor what you need to do to get it right. You will need to go to Partition in Disk Utility, click off the Current scheme and select a new one, then the Options button will become active and you can click it and, from the drop down sheet you can check GUID Partition Table, then click apply to actually get the new partition scheme. Obviously if you already have data on the drive you are going to have to move it somewhere else first. Furthermore, it looks to me that if you want use the new ability to do "on the fly" adjustments to partitions the drive has to use the GUID partition map.
Bugs and BooBoos and Works no More
1. Disk Utility and Repair Permissions, or the barber pole forever: I watched Acitivity Monitor as Disk Utility did its thing, because the progress bar seemed to be stuck in barber pole mode forever and I wondered what in the world, if anything, was happening. At first the main process, using about 95% in the CPU column, was something called "installdb" (whose user is shown as "_installer")--the spinning barber pole was showing. After a couple of minutes that process vanished, and "repair_packages" kicked in, still the spinning barber pole, this process showed as using about 75% in the CPU column. After about a minute or so it abruptly finished and vanished, and the barber pole turned into a progress bar which filled almost instantly.
This odd situation was partially fixed in the 10.5.1 update: at least they did connect the processes to the status bar, so it doesn't stay as a barber pole but actually displays progress. Unfortunately the progress report is completely and hopelessly wrong. At least you won't think it is hung and doing nothing. And be patient: it is now consulting a lot more data for a lot more things than used to be the case in Tiger. It will take longer, especially the first time you run it. Some people report running times as long 30 minutes. My machine now does the permissions repair in under 5 minutes, which is apparently fairly speedy.
Lots of people are disturbed by a seemingly endless list of warnings about SUID and ACL. The large update evidently will silence the warnings, so if they bother you don't use Software Update, download the full updater from Apple and run it (it weighs in at 110MBs, while the one I got thru Software Update was a mere 40MBs). Actually the seemingly endless list of stuff is just Disk Utility once again becoming needlessly chatty. Remember Jaguar? You can just ignore them.
2. Desktop and Screensaver: If you want to use custom picture folders for your Desktop, and you have Aperture but do not have an iPhoto Library, you'll discover there is no way to add your own folder to the list of choices. Just launch iPhoto and have it create an iPhoto Library, it isn't even necessary to add anything to said Library, it just has to exist. You can then add your own folders to the list of choices.
And the most bizarre bug of all: in Screensaver if you use anything other than the default of 5 rows in the iTunes saver everything turns pink! Again, the 10.5.1 update changed things, but didn't actually fix anything. The iTunes screensaver is still broken, just broken in a slightly different way--on my machine selecting rows 2, 4 and 8 works, others don't, the preview will show things as pinkish when they aren't, and show things as OK when running the saver shows pink. Furthermore, the Tiger 10.4.11 update broke its version of iTunes saver in the same way, perhaps even worse--Tiger users report that there are no row selection numbers that work correctly. One fellow reported that at least his mother liked the effect, which is fortunate since there is no fix. Below is the pref pane, with the preview showing everything in pink, however if I actually run the saver it is mostly correct (about 1 in 10 covers are pink tinged, but as they rotate out they are replaced by correctly colored covers).
3. Invisiblility in Leopard, or the disappearing drive annoyance becomes more intractable. See this very lengthy discussion of the problem:
Macintosh HD icon is not on my Desktop or visible from the Finder
Although Paul Laskin marked it solved, since he got his drive to be visible for all of 24 hours at one point, it turned out not to be the case. The problem was still unsolved, and Paul has submitted a bug report. I don't think the cause is known to the Apple engineers, since the problem first appeared in Tiger, and was never fixed at the source. What was an occasional annoyance, easily corrected in Tiger, seems to have become an unsolveable problem for some systems in Leopard. See my article on the topic HERE, which provides several solutions, any of which will fix the Tiger problem, and sometimes fix the Leopard version of the problem. There is a new wrinkle involving Spotlight, scroll down to the Leopard section for a solution that has worked for a number of people.
Also there are reports that using Windows in Parallels and accessing a file in the home directory from a Windows program instantly causes the home directory to become invisible. If this happens to you be sure to check the Parallels web site to see if there is a fix to stop it from happening. The article on Invisibles also provides the command to reset the folder to visible.
4. Loss of admin status: Some people update to Leopard and discover that their regular account has inexplicably lost the ability to adminster the computer, as in install something that requires a password. If that happens to you, take a look at this Apple KB article.
In future you might benefit from having a second admin account, left in the default state (just the way Apple makes it, with no additions). I always have one, it is invaluable for testing purposes and general troubleshooting. In this case it is possible that the other account would still have admin rights, so you could just log into that account and give your regular account its rights back in the Accounts pref pane.
5. Photoshop 7 and Elements 2 will not work in Leopard. They will never work in Leopard. If you want to upgrade to Leopard you will have to upgrade Photoshop. Period.
6. Classic is stone cold dead. Doesn't work in Leopard. As far as Apple is concerned it is dead technology, and the latest OS has driven a stake thru its heart. It won't be coming back.
7. Can't add custom icon to hard drive:
There are several possible problems, all of which I ran into at one time or another:
A. The Copy/Paste function of GetInfo has had a nervous breakdown, relaunching Finder fixes this (until next time). Sometimes using Copy/Paste from the Edit menu is a better option than the keyboard shortcuts, because you can see whether Paste is available or greyed out. If it is greyed out then that could be because nothing got copied to the clipboard, or because you don't have permission to alter that item.
B. A strange permissions glitch (or new "feature") about adding an icon to the drive or various other folders that don't belong to you--hey, in order to change settings for even your very own files you have to click the lock icon at the bottom of the GetInfo window and give your password! It is possible things have gotten a bit over-zealous in this area.
C. The Finder is asleep at the switch and even though the Paste function is active and you select Paste, nothing appears to have happened. Actually it has, Finder is just not registering and displaying the change. Again, force relaunching Finder will cause it to act correctly.
What to do depends on which of the above is the cause of the problem. So, when you do a copy of the icon you want to use, can you paste it to a test folder? If you then do GetInfo on the drive, after successfully pasting the icon on a folder, is Paste available from the Edit menu?
If it isn't you should be able to make it available by clicking the lock at the bottom of the GetInfo window, give your password, then in the Sharing & Permissions section click the tiny double arrows next to "Read Only" for everyone and change it to "Read & Write" and then try again. Be sure to change it back before you close the GetInfo window.
8. Eject, Moving Files and the Finder When you eject something, drive or CD or dmg, the Finder window closes. I don't know whether to classify it as a bug or a feature. The old behavior was sorta illogical, the new behavior is logical, but silly. Anyway, if the thing being ejected (dmg or drive or whatever) is selected so that the Finder window is displaying its contents, and you eject it then the Finder window closes. If something else is selected and you eject whatever by clicking just the eject button next to it (but don't select it), the window doesn't close because the object ejected wasn't the window being displayed. Logical. New. Annoying.
Even more annoyinng, and much more likely a real bug, is moving a file down the file hierarchy in Column view. You have a file at one level, you burrow down to where you want it to go, click and drag the file to its new home:
As soon as you drop it you are immediately taken back to where the file came from, rather than the Finder window remaining in the place where you just dropped it.
Oddly enough, if you move the file back up the tree the view doesn't change--if you drag it from the Documents folder back up to a higher level the window continues to show the folder you drug the file from.
9. Failure to Eject, Drives and .dmgs is yet another bug. You try everything you know to eject a drive or a mounted .dmg, and it stays in the Sidebar and on the Desktop. The easiest work around is to hold down the Option key, click on the Finder icon in the Dock and select Relaunch. All Finder windows close. But you can now eject whatever it was. Until next time.