137th Gebirg
Guest
Hello!
I posted this on the forums and I figured I'd try this as well to see if anything comes of it.
First off, I just got a used dual-core 2.5GHz G5 to succeed my poor old 500MHz G4. She's served me well, but it's finally time to upgrade.
So! I got the new machine and I installed 10.5 on it (the old G4 had 10.4) and started migrating my data files, preferences and other stuff across my network. For the most part, everything went smoothly with a few notable exceptions.
1) MS Office 2004 has some kind of "Cannot find framework" issue the first time you press any key in MS Word. After that, everything is fine. Weird - but not as weird as the next one.
2) I use Eudora 6.2 as my primary email client. When I tried moving the mailboxes over from 10.4 to 10.5, there is some property that isn't being transferred - Eudora on 10.5 does not recognize the mailboxes as mailboxes. Or, I should say, 10.5 does not recognize them as such. See, not only is there the "Choose Application" association capability, there's also this additional thing called "Kind" in the file properties section, which does not seem to be affected by the application affiliation in any way. 10.5 recognizes the old mailboxes as "Executable Unix File", not "Eudora Mailbox or Text File". Interestingly, the same version of Eudora (6.2), when freshly installed on 10.5, creates several new mailboxes with the proper file "Kind". All attempts at changing the "Kind" anywhere have failed.
Additionally, I've noticed there's something new with the way the permissions are set up in the shell. Files that are created new in 10.5 have a little "@" symbol next to the permissions string, like this:
rwxr-xr-x@
Some new directories have a "+" sign after their permissions:
drwxr-xr-x+
This stuff was NOT in 10.4, and I noticed that all the Eudora files with the "@" after them worked fine in 10.5 and the ones that came from 10.4 do not and have the "Kind" flag screwed up. What ARE these new characters??
It gets better...
I called Apple tech support last night and I reached their top guy - by top guy, I mean he told me he was the senior tech specialist AND he had the same voice as on all the recorded phone-based messages before I actually got to him. So, I figured, well, I just met the Wizard of Oz tonight - time to spill my guts.
He was friendly on the outset, but after I explained the problem, he quickly shut down and said "we don't support third party products". How very MicroSloth of him. After explaining to him (several times) that this was not a third party problem, but a problem with a non-standard modification of the BSD Unix permissions configuration and that I needed to know how to change these new flags at the kernel level, he shut down even more by saying that "Apple does not provide that level of technical support", meaning, they won't let me hack their non-standard kernel that is causing backward-compatibility problems. He actually refused to tell me what the "@" and "+" characters meant on the permission string in the shell! WTF?!?!?!?
Honestly, I always thought that Apple Tech Support was supposed to be like the Saturn for computer services - VERY helpful and VERY knowledgeable.
This encounter was anything but helpful. I almost felt like I was knocking on a door that Apple didn't want me to knock on. Like there was some kind of deep dark secret that I stumbled upon by accident. This guy was ADAMANT about not providing any shell/kernel/command line support to help me work this problem. It's their software! It's their problem!
Other apps that I had running in 10.4 also experienced this problem too, like Flash Player, Bink Player and some others that I wound up having to freshly install to get the flags to set "properly" - but I NEED those mailboxes to work!
So, for the time being, I reformatted the drive, installed 10.4, and am moving over my old stuff that way, knowing that there won't be any compatibility issues between 10.4 and 10.4. Then, after everything is done, I will THEN upgrade to 10.5 (I did a fresh install of 10.5 at the beginning, causing these problems initially) to see if it automagically sets all the proper "Kind" flags or whatever needs to be done to get my old stuff to work.
I always thought the cultural death knell of Apple was when they went over to an Intel architecture. My dad got one of the new Intel iMacs and he's having problems switching back and forth between 10.5 and XP, with shifting resolutions and hosing up the icon locations, etc. From what I've seen from Apple lately this year, I'm honestly not impressed, and I've been an Apple bigot since 1993. I'm really quite sad.
In any case, if there are any MACH Ninjas out there that know what this new thing is, please enlighten me. Any info appreciated. Thank you in advance!
I posted this on the forums and I figured I'd try this as well to see if anything comes of it.
First off, I just got a used dual-core 2.5GHz G5 to succeed my poor old 500MHz G4. She's served me well, but it's finally time to upgrade.
So! I got the new machine and I installed 10.5 on it (the old G4 had 10.4) and started migrating my data files, preferences and other stuff across my network. For the most part, everything went smoothly with a few notable exceptions.
1) MS Office 2004 has some kind of "Cannot find framework" issue the first time you press any key in MS Word. After that, everything is fine. Weird - but not as weird as the next one.
2) I use Eudora 6.2 as my primary email client. When I tried moving the mailboxes over from 10.4 to 10.5, there is some property that isn't being transferred - Eudora on 10.5 does not recognize the mailboxes as mailboxes. Or, I should say, 10.5 does not recognize them as such. See, not only is there the "Choose Application" association capability, there's also this additional thing called "Kind" in the file properties section, which does not seem to be affected by the application affiliation in any way. 10.5 recognizes the old mailboxes as "Executable Unix File", not "Eudora Mailbox or Text File". Interestingly, the same version of Eudora (6.2), when freshly installed on 10.5, creates several new mailboxes with the proper file "Kind". All attempts at changing the "Kind" anywhere have failed.
Additionally, I've noticed there's something new with the way the permissions are set up in the shell. Files that are created new in 10.5 have a little "@" symbol next to the permissions string, like this:
rwxr-xr-x@
Some new directories have a "+" sign after their permissions:
drwxr-xr-x+
This stuff was NOT in 10.4, and I noticed that all the Eudora files with the "@" after them worked fine in 10.5 and the ones that came from 10.4 do not and have the "Kind" flag screwed up. What ARE these new characters??
It gets better...
I called Apple tech support last night and I reached their top guy - by top guy, I mean he told me he was the senior tech specialist AND he had the same voice as on all the recorded phone-based messages before I actually got to him. So, I figured, well, I just met the Wizard of Oz tonight - time to spill my guts.
He was friendly on the outset, but after I explained the problem, he quickly shut down and said "we don't support third party products". How very MicroSloth of him. After explaining to him (several times) that this was not a third party problem, but a problem with a non-standard modification of the BSD Unix permissions configuration and that I needed to know how to change these new flags at the kernel level, he shut down even more by saying that "Apple does not provide that level of technical support", meaning, they won't let me hack their non-standard kernel that is causing backward-compatibility problems. He actually refused to tell me what the "@" and "+" characters meant on the permission string in the shell! WTF?!?!?!?
Honestly, I always thought that Apple Tech Support was supposed to be like the Saturn for computer services - VERY helpful and VERY knowledgeable.
This encounter was anything but helpful. I almost felt like I was knocking on a door that Apple didn't want me to knock on. Like there was some kind of deep dark secret that I stumbled upon by accident. This guy was ADAMANT about not providing any shell/kernel/command line support to help me work this problem. It's their software! It's their problem!
Other apps that I had running in 10.4 also experienced this problem too, like Flash Player, Bink Player and some others that I wound up having to freshly install to get the flags to set "properly" - but I NEED those mailboxes to work!
So, for the time being, I reformatted the drive, installed 10.4, and am moving over my old stuff that way, knowing that there won't be any compatibility issues between 10.4 and 10.4. Then, after everything is done, I will THEN upgrade to 10.5 (I did a fresh install of 10.5 at the beginning, causing these problems initially) to see if it automagically sets all the proper "Kind" flags or whatever needs to be done to get my old stuff to work.
I always thought the cultural death knell of Apple was when they went over to an Intel architecture. My dad got one of the new Intel iMacs and he's having problems switching back and forth between 10.5 and XP, with shifting resolutions and hosing up the icon locations, etc. From what I've seen from Apple lately this year, I'm honestly not impressed, and I've been an Apple bigot since 1993. I'm really quite sad.
In any case, if there are any MACH Ninjas out there that know what this new thing is, please enlighten me. Any info appreciated. Thank you in advance!