Redwood Asylum (emeritus)
...by the inmates...for the inmates...
Friday, November 29, 2002
Not Impressed With Jaguar
Continuing where I left off with the Jaguar Mac OS X upgrade on Wednesday night...
I decided to do this upgrade just as any novice would. Apple claims this is the operating system "for the rest of us" so I try taking them at their word. Mistake. "The rest of us" are screwed.
This PowerBook has used a WaveLAN/Lucent/Orinoco/Agere and now Proxim wireless network card flawlessly for about 2 years. As mentioned earlier, I upgraded from OS 9.0 to 9.2 as required by Jaguar. Wireless card still works great. Upgrade to OS X. Card not recognized. Come on now... the Orinoco wireless card is just about the most popular and reliable wireless NIC on the planet. Apple does not support it under OS X. Tech support says they have no intention to do so. They claim you have to throw it away and go spend $100 on an Apple Airport card, which is.... a modified and re-branded Orinoco card. This is enough to make you switch right back to Windoze. Apple has gotten so arrogant they should be called Applesoft.
After I stopped sputtering (again, I'm trying to imagine myself as a typical novice user experiencing all of this) I realized that all the heavy-duty Apple Orinoco users would never stand for this crap, so off to Google I go. Thank God for the open source community. The driver at wirelessdriver.sourceforge.net is a beta, but claims to work.
But not for me. By now, it is 2:30 a.m. on Thursday, Thanksgiving Day. Time for bed.
.
.
.
Two days pass. Thanksgiving with friends was fun. A separate short post will appear regarding the event.
.
.
.
Now it is Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. I decide to use the PowerBook with CAT 5 cable for now, while I deal with other problems that started after the OS X upgrade.
The CD-ROM drive on this PowerBook, which has never been a problem before, would fail to respond at least once every half-hour while reading the 'Getting Started' CD in the web browser. If you assume the drive or CD media were suddenly bad, you would think the oh-so-powerful OS X would allow you to eject the media when it started acting up. Nooooo.
OK. Assume the bad drive or media has so pissed off the CD subsystem that it can't process an eject command. You should be able to at least shut down the system. Noooo. You get a message saying the system could not shut down because Internet Explorer refuses to terminate. Oh... the big bad browser is too much for the goofy GUI to close. The error dialog box suggests the user do a Force Quit on Explorer and then try to shut down the system.
Puhleeeze. You want me to go do that for you? I thought that was your job! Where is that vaunted "ease of use" that Apple talks about? Why doesn't the operating system do a Force Quit on a stalled application when I command the system to shut down? How easy is your GUI when *I* have to do the Force Quit for you before you can shut down?
OK. Take a deep breath. UNIX has been around a thousand years, so we know it can kill anything if you tell it to shut down. It's just the eye candy OS X Jaguar GUI acting stupid. I perform the Force Quit and Explorer finally closes. Now tell the system to shut down again. All icons disappear from desktop but desktop background is still there; system still running. Wait 5 minutes. Worthless colorful GUI still running. Lean on power switch. That it understands.
Nooooo. Wake up system and find that download manager is claiming fatal error. Looks like the system decided to go to sleep in the middle of downloading updates. A novice would not know to change the sleep settings to NEVER sleep, so I left them at their defaults. OK. No harm done. Just tell system to go get remaining downloads, since I knew it already retrieved all updates except the last one. Start update process. Discover that none of the updates were kept. Did I hear someone say "ease of use"? Worthless stupid Jaguar OS X Applesoft GUI.
Set sleep setting to NEVER sleep. Why is this "easy to use" GUI too stupid to realize that the system is not idle while it is downloading. Start one-hour download again. Install all updates. Eye-candy GUI still unable to shut down system with stalled application when asked, requiring me to use power switch.
Yes, this is a supported model of PowerBook for running OS X. Yes, the expansion memory is Apple brand.
Check the encryption key several times. Matches fine. Download a WEP encryption key generator and re-gen the hex key from our existing network passphrase. Enter the hex values instead of the passphrase. No dice. After other fruitless attempts, we turn off encryption. Bingo, instant packet passing. The open source driver is working fine. Re-enter the same encryption key again. Dead.
This encryption key has worked fine on all four wireless cards with several flavors of Windoze and Mac OS 9, but it refuses to work with the open source driver and OS X. It finally occurs to us to try a completely different encryption key. Poof! Problem gone! OS X now passes encrypted wireless traffic over the Orinoco card just fine. Reprogram the other three cards with the new key and they work fine, as they always did.
Watch the Muppet Special on TV. Play with Linux 8, also installed in last few days, and a post for another day. Edit this post and it is now after 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning. Time for sleep.
...by the inmates...for the inmates...
Friday, November 29, 2002Not Impressed With Jaguar
Continuing where I left off with the Jaguar Mac OS X upgrade on Wednesday night...
"Referred to by its code name, Jaguar, Mac OS X v10.2 is a different breed of operating system. Jaguar combines the rock-solid reliability of UNIX with the ease of use of Macintosh. " - Apple web siteMarketing malarkey. Maybe the UNIX 'under the covers' is reliable, but certainly not the goofy GUI they slapped on top.
I decided to do this upgrade just as any novice would. Apple claims this is the operating system "for the rest of us" so I try taking them at their word. Mistake. "The rest of us" are screwed.
This PowerBook has used a WaveLAN/Lucent/Orinoco/Agere and now Proxim wireless network card flawlessly for about 2 years. As mentioned earlier, I upgraded from OS 9.0 to 9.2 as required by Jaguar. Wireless card still works great. Upgrade to OS X. Card not recognized. Come on now... the Orinoco wireless card is just about the most popular and reliable wireless NIC on the planet. Apple does not support it under OS X. Tech support says they have no intention to do so. They claim you have to throw it away and go spend $100 on an Apple Airport card, which is.... a modified and re-branded Orinoco card. This is enough to make you switch right back to Windoze. Apple has gotten so arrogant they should be called Applesoft.
After I stopped sputtering (again, I'm trying to imagine myself as a typical novice user experiencing all of this) I realized that all the heavy-duty Apple Orinoco users would never stand for this crap, so off to Google I go. Thank God for the open source community. The driver at wirelessdriver.sourceforge.net is a beta, but claims to work.
But not for me. By now, it is 2:30 a.m. on Thursday, Thanksgiving Day. Time for bed.
.
.
.
Two days pass. Thanksgiving with friends was fun. A separate short post will appear regarding the event.
.
.
.
Now it is Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. I decide to use the PowerBook with CAT 5 cable for now, while I deal with other problems that started after the OS X upgrade.
The CD-ROM drive on this PowerBook, which has never been a problem before, would fail to respond at least once every half-hour while reading the 'Getting Started' CD in the web browser. If you assume the drive or CD media were suddenly bad, you would think the oh-so-powerful OS X would allow you to eject the media when it started acting up. Nooooo.
OK. Assume the bad drive or media has so pissed off the CD subsystem that it can't process an eject command. You should be able to at least shut down the system. Noooo. You get a message saying the system could not shut down because Internet Explorer refuses to terminate. Oh... the big bad browser is too much for the goofy GUI to close. The error dialog box suggests the user do a Force Quit on Explorer and then try to shut down the system.
Puhleeeze. You want me to go do that for you? I thought that was your job! Where is that vaunted "ease of use" that Apple talks about? Why doesn't the operating system do a Force Quit on a stalled application when I command the system to shut down? How easy is your GUI when *I* have to do the Force Quit for you before you can shut down?
OK. Take a deep breath. UNIX has been around a thousand years, so we know it can kill anything if you tell it to shut down. It's just the eye candy OS X Jaguar GUI acting stupid. I perform the Force Quit and Explorer finally closes. Now tell the system to shut down again. All icons disappear from desktop but desktop background is still there; system still running. Wait 5 minutes. Worthless colorful GUI still running. Lean on power switch. That it understands.
"Referred to by its code name, Jaguar, Mac OS X v10.2 is a different breed of operating system. Jaguar combines the rock-solid reliability of UNIX with the ease of use of Macintosh. " - Apple web siteOK. Maybe not fair to take potshots at OS X 10.2 GUI when 10.2.2 update available. Act like novice user and tell system to download updates. Six updates to download, will take over an hour using 125K ISDN line. Wander through the room about every 10 minutes to see how it is going. Sometimes have to flick the touchpad to unblank the screen. (Some of you already know what is coming. Don't shout out the answer and spoil it for the rest of the newbies.) After an hour, on another pass through the room, notice that power light is blinking. Odd. Figure that download must have finally finished and that system, after installing updates, and was waiting for me to reboot.
Nooooo. Wake up system and find that download manager is claiming fatal error. Looks like the system decided to go to sleep in the middle of downloading updates. A novice would not know to change the sleep settings to NEVER sleep, so I left them at their defaults. OK. No harm done. Just tell system to go get remaining downloads, since I knew it already retrieved all updates except the last one. Start update process. Discover that none of the updates were kept. Did I hear someone say "ease of use"? Worthless stupid Jaguar OS X Applesoft GUI.
Set sleep setting to NEVER sleep. Why is this "easy to use" GUI too stupid to realize that the system is not idle while it is downloading. Start one-hour download again. Install all updates. Eye-candy GUI still unable to shut down system with stalled application when asked, requiring me to use power switch.
Yes, this is a supported model of PowerBook for running OS X. Yes, the expansion memory is Apple brand.
"Referred to by its code name, Jaguar, Mac OS X v10.2 is a different breed of operating system. Jaguar combines the rock-solid reliability of UNIX with the ease of use of Macintosh. " - Apple web siteNow it is Friday evening and my son Bryan comes to visit. He knows UNIX and was able to peek under Apple's skirt to see 'whazzup' with the wireless network card. UNIX sees data moving over the wireless link, but it claims it can't read the encryption.
Check the encryption key several times. Matches fine. Download a WEP encryption key generator and re-gen the hex key from our existing network passphrase. Enter the hex values instead of the passphrase. No dice. After other fruitless attempts, we turn off encryption. Bingo, instant packet passing. The open source driver is working fine. Re-enter the same encryption key again. Dead.
This encryption key has worked fine on all four wireless cards with several flavors of Windoze and Mac OS 9, but it refuses to work with the open source driver and OS X. It finally occurs to us to try a completely different encryption key. Poof! Problem gone! OS X now passes encrypted wireless traffic over the Orinoco card just fine. Reprogram the other three cards with the new key and they work fine, as they always did.
Watch the Muppet Special on TV. Play with Linux 8, also installed in last few days, and a post for another day. Edit this post and it is now after 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning. Time for sleep.
11:48:32 PM