So it’s been a few weeks since Mac release Tiger, and I’m itchin’ to get it! However, I only just bought Panther a few months ago, and I’m not sure how safe it is to upgrade so soon, especially keeping in mind all the bugs Jaguar had when it was first released.
So how has OS X.4 been working for MacDopers out there? Any significant bugs? I keep hearing about how awesomely awesome it is; does it live up to its hype? I must know!
You might want to peruse the threads over at MacOS X Hints.
The upshot of it seems to be that it’s still a slightly bleeding edge. Some things break or won’t work until a Tiger-compatibility upgrade comes out. Many things work fine already but you may have to download the Tiger-compatibility upgrade that’s already come out. And of course many things that will eventually exist and be quite cool haven’t been written yet, things that will exploit the new capacities within Tiger.
In the long run, it looks like Apple has made an excellent long-term investment in flexibility of permissioning and metadata.
As I tell everyone who asks, most of the big improvements are under the hood. Expect to see some ass-kickin’ Mac applications that require 10.4 down the road, and some amazing new stuff in MacOS X 10.5 that builds on the groundwork Apple has now laid down.
For me the update was rather painless but then again I backed up my users folder and did a clean install.
Almost every program I use (MS Office, games, Skype, Photoshop) either worked fine right away or had an update out within a week. Most of the programs that broke were utilities that needed to be updated to handle the behind the scenes changes in Tiger (kernel extensions, ACL bits of the file system, etc) and almost every one of them has been updated by now.
Macintouch has some good coverage as well
http://www.macintouch.com/tigerreview/
http://www.macintouch.com/tiger.html
For me personally, I’m not a bleeding edge kinda guy…I’ll probably wait for 10.4.2
Additonally, the TiVo Desktop software (which is used to stream music to my entertainment system) is not currently compatable with Tiger. There is a cludgy workaround, but I’ll see if TiVo fixes it themselves first.
I upgraded both home and work machines to Tiger (taking appropriate backup precautions, of course). Had no major problems on either setup, and no apps broke in the process. There do seem to be more than the usual amount of “fit and finish” bugs in the .0 release: not show-stoppers, but little details that Apple usually does a better job on. I’d say if you’re eager to get the benefits of Spotlight and Dashboard (and you ought to be), don’t be afraid to upgrade.
overall, it’s been quite stable on both of my machines (G4 MDD 1.25GHzDP and 1 GHz 15" Aluminum)
i haven’t experienced the “vanishing e-mail” issue others have, it’s been perfect on the AlBook, on the MDD however, i’ve lost use of my SCSI hard drive, it’s unreliable and doesn’t boot consistently, and as long as the SCSI card is installed, the machine won’t go into deep sleep mode
the MDD is configured as such;
1.25 GHz Dual processor
2 160 GB IDE hard drives
Pioneer DVR-105 SuperDrive (Apple)
Pioneer DVR-105 SuperDrive (3rd party)
2 GB RAM
nVidia GeForce 4 Titanium AGP vidcard driving 17" NEC monitor
ATI Rage Orion vidcard (currently unused)
Keyspan 2 port USB 1.1 PCI card
uninstalled components;
ATTO SCSI-3 PCI card
75 GB Seagate Cheetah 10,000 RPM hard drive
both IDE drives are running 10.4.1, no issues, aside from the SCSI card issue
it seems like Apple’s slowly trying to phase out SCSI, i’ve heard RUMORS that 10.4.x will be the last Mac OS to support SCSI, i hope not, i still prefer SCSI over IDE and i’d hate to see it go away…
I did a clean install two weeks ago on my 500 Mhz iBook, and have had no problems. Yesterday, I did an update to my 2 Ghz 20" iMac G5, with less pleasant results. It runs fine as long as I am actively using it, but if I leave it alone for an hour or two, it hangs up; the cursor disappears, the bluetooth keyboard and mouse do not respond, and the cooling fan kicks into high gear. I’ve got a full backup of my home directory, so I’m considering just doing a clean install to see if that takes care of the problem. However, that may mean I’ll lose the bonus software which shipped with the iMac, most notably iLife.
Although TiVo says they do not support running their TiVo Desktop application with Tiger, there is a fix on the TiVo Community Forum, which I have tested on my iBook with good results. It worked briefly on the iMac, but then went away. The two problems may be related, but I don’t see how just yet.
More research may be required.
are you running Virex 7.5.x? it’s not compatible with Tiger, specifically, it’s got a background monitoring/scanning app that eats up 95% of your processor time, causing the high speed fans and other issues
go to Utilities, open up Activity Monitor, and select “%CPU”
find the process that’s eating up your processor time and look at it’s Process ID (the first number in the leftmost collumn, lets say in this case the PID is 666)
go to Utilities, open Terminal, at the command prompt, type in the following command…
kill -9 666
then hit return
that should force the process to quit, if not, type in;
sudo kill -9 666
it’ll ask you for your password
enter it, and hit return (the password will not be displayed while you type)
that should kill the errant process and drop your fan speed to normal
That’s a G3, right? How is the speed on that? I’ve been hesitating to upgrade my iMac (450MHz G3), partially to wait for the first-release bugs to get shaken out, and to hear how Tiger runs on older hardware.
I’d love to just get a new G5 and be done with it, but that’s not likely any time soon…
Speed seems just fine; granted, I primarily just use it for Safari and Office these days.