Taming the Big Cat

OS X 10.2 is better than ever -- but it's a finicky beast :: Like most of the Mac faithful that already have made the leap to OS X, I was waiting for OS X 10.2, code-named "Jaguar," to solve all of my operating system problems.

Not that I had that many problems, mind you. The biggest was speed. I have a Rev. B "Bondi" iMac, one of the original iMacs, which came out of the box with a 266 Mhz processor and 64 megabytes of RAM. It has become my second "FrankenMac" now -- it's got a 500 Mhz Sonnet Harmoni upgrade with a firewire port, 512 megabytes of RAM, a 40 gigabyte hard drive and an external firewire 60 gigabyte drive. Sounds plenty X capable, right? Well, yes. And no. You see, the biggest problem I had was my video card, an original ATI Rage Pro with 6 megabytes of video memory. Until 10.1.5, it wasn't even supported by OS X for things like QuickTime playback (large QuickTime movies would look like they were running on a Performa!).

But while OS X 10.1.5 was still usable, I was looking forward to improvements in the OS like the multi-threaded Finder and other speed improvements, which would help folks with older machines and G3s like mine.

When I installed Jaguar, at about 5 p.m. on Aug. 24, the release day, I did what most people are calling a "clean install." In other words, I let the installer reformat my OS X partition and start from scratch. You can also choose an "upgrade" or to "archive and install," which migrates your settings and modifications into a fresh system folder. My reasoning was that I wanted to manually move my old things over to a brand new, freshly formatted partition.

Some things were broken right out of the box: pretty much all of the "haxies" I've come to depend on from Unsanity, for example, which reintroduce certain functionalities lost by Apple in the transition from OS 9 to OS X. But they've since come out with Jaguar fixes for all of them.

For the first few days, that speed increase was there, and it was noticeable.

And then it was gone.

It was replaced by a sluggish, bloated, hulking monster of a cat that seemed sloth around my monitor as slow as it possibly could. Just switching between mailboxes in Apple's Mail.App program gave me enough time to go to the kitchen to get a soda. The new 3D version of the "Spinning Beach Ball of Death," while it looked cute and gumdroppy the first time I saw it, got really old really quick.

It took a couple of days of troubleshooting, removing third-party software and experimenting, but I've finally gotten that speed back, and it's stayed. Part of it may have been the now infamous "permissions" problem, another part may have been Unsanity's haxie "WindowShadeX," which brings back the window shade function from OS 9. Unsanity released an update earlier this week that, among other improvements, said it fixed an issue that made Jaguar "run as slow as molasses." Yup. That's what happened to me.

In the process of my experimentation, I also came across a series of troubleshooting steps for those who aren't seeing the very real speed increases that Jaguar offers. It's by no means an exhaustive list. If you get through the whole thing and nothing has changed, don't blame me. I'm just the messenger.

• Use Apple's "fix permissions" utility. It's all over the Web now, but the first thing you should do, especially if you only ran an upgrade installation or an archive and install installation, is to run this utility, which is on the First Aid tab of Apple's Disk Utility application. Some have said that you should only run this while booted from the OS X install CD, but I've also run it just fine while booted into Jaguar. It shouldn't make a difference really. But it has been proven to speed up many people's Jaguar installs.
• Update or disable third-party software. As you have seen with my WindowShadeX experience, third-party software not updated to run on Jaguar can often be the culprit. Menu extras, for example, those little icons some apps place to the right of your menu bar, have intentionally been disabled by Apple in Jaguar (shame on you, Infinite Loop!). Unsanity, the major purveyor of such madness, already has fixed its apps and even has produced a wonderful little piece of freeware that re-enables third-party menu extras in Jaguar. Check it out. But some apps or drivers could find themselves depending upon libraries that have moved -- or are no longer there. Try disabling everything that didn't come with OS X and then troubleshoot your speed problems from there.
• Try disconnecting external hardware. One of the primary causes of "kernel panics," another term for a complete meltdown of your UNIX system, is a hardware conflict. Such a conflict also could be disabling the performance of your system. It's worth a try. Unplug all of your FireWire and USB devices and see if it makes a difference.
• Become someone else. No, don't go out and buy a wig. Create a new user in the Users preference pane. This is one of the things that clued me into the fact that Jaguar could be fast again. It took some work, but I actually recreated a lot of my settings on a new user after my slowdown. When I logged on as that user, I noticed that I had a whopping increase in speed of the system. Some of my preferences or settings from 10.1.5 may have become corrupt or maybe just were not compatible with the Jag. I don't know, but it worked.
• To defrag, or not to defrag? Another possibility is that your drive has become defragmented, or the data has become spread all over your drive in such a way that the disk has to do a lot of work to find the information stored there. Some on the e-mail lists have said that this shouldn't be an issue with UNIX systems. One lister writes: "Accuracy of the Directory is far more important for speed, and, in extreme cases, simple functioning, than all but the most extreme cases of fragmentation." The moral? Defrag if you want, but it may be more important to fix your file systems by running Disk Warrior, Drive, Norton or Tech Tool Pro. Probably most effective of all of these is the "fsck -y" program built directly into OS X. Reboot into single-user mode (hold down the command and "s" keys during startup) and wait for the prompt. At this point, your UNIX disk has not actually been mounted and you're running in a small bit of the UNIX kernel. At the prompt, type "fsck -y" (no quotes) and hit return. It will go through and check your bootup disk's directory for errors and fix any of them. If it finds errors (it will tell you), run the same command when you get the prompt again. Repeat this exercise until it tells you that your file system appears to be "clean." To get back into OS X, type "exit" (to continue booting) or "reboot" (to reboot) and hit return.
• The OS that never sleeps. UNIX is meant to be a 24-7 operating system. Period. Some of you may feel compelled to still shut down your computer at night to save energy, or just out of habit. If you do, you should keep certain utilities such as Mac Janitor, around to help UNIX keep itself tidy. The system normally runs maintenance scripts early in the morning (like at 3 a.m.), when, supposedly, many users are snoozing and asleep. This program runs them for you whenever you want. Other popular utilities have popped up since OS X hit the scene that perform "pre-binding" routines, which are supposed to speed up the amount of time it takes to load an application. You should know that Jaguar does this routine on its own now, and these utilities are no longer needed.

One or some of those things may help you get a quicker Jaguar experience. The following tips aren't necessarily related to speed, but some Jaguar users may find them helpful.

• Bring back your Happy Mac! Some folks (not me) have lamented the disappearance of the "Happy Mac" icon that has greeted Mac users upon startup for years. If you really, really, really miss it, there are now applications that can help you bring it back, like hello Jaguar.
• Feeling shafted by your "upgrade" CD? Apparently, those lucky folks who bought new Macs after MacWorld who were eligible for the $20 Jaguar fulfillment program weren't so lucky, after all. Some users are reporting that the CD they get is actually an "upgrade" CD that doesn't give users the option to archive and install. A helpful e-mail lister posted the following solution:
  
  1) Launch Disk Copy
  2) Make a *read/write* disk image of the first 10.2 upgrade CD.
  3) Mount the image and open up the folder 'Packages' which is located here: System:Installation:Packages
  4) Select the file 'Essentials.pkg'
  5) Ctrl-click on the package and tell it to 'show contents of package'
  6) double-click on the folder 'Contents' in the resulting new window
  7) double-click on the next folder 'Resources'
  8) Remove the 'Check for OS X' item by dragging it to the trash and emptying the trash.
  9) Unmount the CD image (drag it to to the trash)
  10) Go to Disk Copy and tell it to 'Burn Image' and then burn the newly modified Disc Image you have just tweaked.
  
  Thanks to Dieder Bylsma for that one.

Jaguar is not perfect -- there still are some rough edges and a 10.2.1 update already is making the developer rounds. But overall, it's a huge improvement over 10.1.5 and has a lot to offer, if you can afford the $129 upgrade fee. You've just got to know how to tame the beast.