OSX and extension conflicts

S

scuzzo84

Registered
I am new to OSX and I am reading a book about it. It mentions in OS9 and below that it doesnt have 'system extensions' anymore which caused many problems and conflicts and freezing. And says there are no more control panels.

I asked my friend what this is and if I understood him right he basically said its like a driver , adding more functionality and not allowing them on boot or something.

Anyways can someone explain this because drivers...you need them and why not on boot? I mean on freebsd dmesg you can even see the driver support being loaded on boot.
 
OS9 used a very complicated and unreliable way of handling add-ons called "extensions". These were used as an equivalent to drivers, codecs, plugins and more. There were extensions for file formats and extensions for hardware devices. A lot of the common problems in OS9 arose from extensions.

The entire system was abandoned with the transition to Mac OS X, which I would consider a very wise move.
 
Well, to clarify, most of the extensions provided by third parties were the ones that would cause conflicts with extensions provided by Apple's OS. The cause can be an extension or control panel that was too old and wouldn't be supported on a newer version of the Mac OS, or vice versa. I remember when ATM used to cause some conflicts with some other extensions and control panels back in System 7.x.

Usually if you followed the proper directions and versions supported, you wouldn't have any issues with conflicts.

In my opinion, it made handling system files easier to understand and manipulate, but thanks to poor naming schemes and lack of descriptions it became quite a nightmare trying to identify a problem with an extension or control panel. Now with OS X, most of the system files are found in /etc or some other location since it's a UNIX-like system. Not something that an everyday user would want to mess with if you ask me. Thankfully, OS X is much more stable than OS 9 which didn't do multitasking and memory management as well as OS X.
 
I must say that i miss seeing those 2 or 3 rows of extensions loading at startup. We used to see who could get the most extensions loaded before it would have problems (on a pair of Performa 6800s). If memory serves, 115 (6-7 rows) was the record.

[/nostalgia]
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top