Greetings from OSX 10.5.6 (1 Viewer)

[Carlo_M]

Come on in boys, the water is fine!

DL'd the combo updater at work (668MB, in a minute or two, gotta love huge pipelines), ran it at home just now, took about 5 minutes, did the double-reboot thing, and am up and running.

Nothing too major, the one thing they claim (and they've claimed this over the past few 10.5.x updates) is better Airport performance. Ever since early 10.5.x I've had intermittent connectivity problems (drops). Hoping this will fix it. Everything else seems to be working just fine. Haven't noticed it break anything.

Anyone else have any impressions? Problems? Performance gains/losses?

 

[Carlo_M]

What's fixed?

 

[DaveF]

Updated last night: just shy of a 200 MB download. Update ran normally with no troubles.

As is typical, no apparent difference to me; none of the big problems fixed affected me. Perhaps my wife will notice the CS3 printing improvements?

 

[Ted Todorov]

Total disaster on my Mini -- on the reboot, came up with a message that the instal had failed due to "corrupt media" (or words to that effect. It then tried to restart and died with a "grey screen of death" (further reboots -- same result). Couldn't boot into open firmware, did boot into Firewire target mode, and was doing a backup from the Mini when I left for work.

I guess the next step is to try to repair the disk using the disk utility, and then -- if reboot fails again???

I could boot off an external drive, but that doesn't do me any good, unless I wipe the internal drive and re-install Leopard from scratch? Suggestions?

 

[Sam Posten]

I saw that the solution was to boot from CD then manually download the larger install pack. Let me see if i can find that link.

edit, here:
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/16/new-o...mooth-for-all/

 

[Carlo_M]

Ted, sorry to hear about your Mac. Did you install the Combo update? Although I've never had my Mac hosed by an incremental update, out of paranoia habit I always use the larger, combo update downloaded direct from Apple. Haven't had a bad upgrade since using the Combo updates (though as I said before the few times I used Apple's Update through OSX I didn't have any problems either).

 

[Parker Clack]

I downloaded the combo today and installed it on my iMac with no problems. I didn't notice much of a change with the OS but Safari does appear to load pages faster.

 

[Ted Todorov]

Yes, but the combo update can't be installed on a different disk from the one you are booting from, right? So now that can't boot from the internal drive, only way to reinstall would be to load Leopard 10.5.0 off the DVD and then install the combo on top of that? Am I missing anything?

And no, I never do the combo, I have always used software update, and have never had a single problem (until today) on many Macs since 10.0.0 (indeed since X public beta).

(Edited to fix the Leopard number -- thanks, Carlo!)

 

[Carlo_M]

Yep, you've got it right Ted (assuming you meant 10.5.0 from the disc ).

 

[Ted Todorov]

Yes, of course... Last question -- do I need to do an erase and install (with the 10.5.0) or can I just do a regular install?

Thanks again,
Ted

 

[Carlo_M]

You know, I'm not really sure, I've (luckily) never had to do a re-install. Maybe someone else can chime in here? Is there a chance that a regular install (not erase) can somehow preserve your personal data? Might be worth chancing it, and if it doesn't work, then do the erase and install.

 

[Ted Todorov]

Well, I woke up with this thought in the middle of the night -- can't I install the Combo update via target disk mode to another machine -- meaning the Mini? Sure enough it worked, and it works! Should have just done that in the first place... Oh well, at least I got a good backup out of it. Live and learn.

Ted

 

[pitchman]

I noticed the "bouncing" icon in my iMac dock last night so I ran the update. To be honest, I didn't really see any difference, but I am a Mac newbie. I didn't realize this is somewhat of a major OS update. Thanks for posting the list of fixes, Carlo. Now that I know what to look for, I will check it out more thoroughly tonight.

 

[Sam Posten]

After hearing about the issues I ran the combo update on my Pro and iMac with no issues.

 

[pitchman]

I had an interesting experience with 10.5.6.

As I said in my earlier post, I am a Mac newbie. After the house took an indirect lightning hit this past fall, I ended up having to replace a less than one year old HP Vista box (your basic Best Buy special.) Since my wife, son and daughter each already had a Macbook, it made sense to replace the desktop with a Mac. I opted for the 3.06 GHz, 24" iMac with 4 GB SDRAM. I've been slowly getting up to speed ever since. I still have some minor glitches with the Airport Extreme network (slower throughput on the Wii and PS3 than the old PC/Linksys setup) and disc burning is considerably slower on the iMac than the PC. Based on the recommendations here, I purchased Toast 9 Titanium and that has helped somewhat. I still find it takes 7-9 minutes to copy your average music CD, compared to 2-3 minutes on the Vista PC. Beyond these small quibbles, I LOVE the new iMac.

Back to the topic at hand. On Thursday (after I updated to 10.5.6 using the file that was waiting for me in the dock,) a buddy sent me an email with an MP3 attachment. The email caused Mail to crash. We're not talking about the attachment mind you, but the message itself. It was like Catch 22. Mail would open, and as soon as it did, it would try to display the message that contained the attachment and then crash. I ended up sending an email from my wife's Macbook to the iMac. Since it did not contain an attachment, I was able to keep Mail open without shutting down. I shift-highlighted both messages and deleted them. And that, I thought, was that. I emailed my friend and told him his attachment appeared to be corrupted and he said he would remake the MP3 and re-send in a few days.

Fast-forward to yesterday. As I was leaving work for holiday break, I had a couple of unfinished projects that I wanted to work on at home next week. Since I was in a hurry to leave, rather than burn a handful of files to CD, I opted to email them home as attachments. We're talking small Word docs and a couple of PDF files. When I got home last night and opened Mail, the same thing happened again. Instant crash-ola! In frustration this morning, I called Apple tech support. It took about an hour and a half to get it figured out, but I finally got it fixed. The culprit? Apparently, the automatic update file that Apple sends to sleeping machines is NOT the combo update, and as far as I can tell, it CAUSES the Mail problem that the combo update corrects! In the end, it was an easy fix, just download the combo update and do an over-the-top install on the other version.

My advice to anyone upgrading to 10.5.6 is to check your version of Mail first. If it is anything less than 3.5, manually download the combo update from Apple's web site and install that one. You'll be glad you did.