Taming the beast
- Article 2 of 53
- iCreate, April 2004
Apple has made plenty of noise about how stable OS X is as an Operating System, but that doesn't mean that things won't go wrong. And when they do you'll be stuck. Join us as we show you how to fix every common Panther problem and apply corrective medicine to a sickly Mac.
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There used to be two common sights in a Mac user’s life. The first was a desktop, filled with lots of icons, such as hard drives, CDs, applications and the trash; the second was also an icon: a little computer icon, just like that very first Mac, but with a smiley face for a screen. The reason this second icon was so familiar was because it was the first thing that appeared when you switched on your Mac. Or, more importantly, when you restarted it.
Restarting used to be “popular” with Mac users. Every time an application crashed or froze, it was time to restart the computer. Every time you added a printer, scanner, external drive or even a mouse to the system, restart time was just round the corner. Installed a program that did something even slightly exciting? Restart time.
And it wasn’t as if application crashes were rare either. Even sneezing or sitting down too hard near your Mac used to make even the simplest of programs crash so hard that nothing short of a lot of swearing and a swift flick of the power switch/mallet three times a day would keep that puppy running smoothly.
Apple knew that couldn’t go on and spent a lot of the 90s trying to retrofit the Macintosh operating system – the software that controls a computer and its hardware, lets programs run, and gives them their familiar appearances – with the bells and whistles necessary to make crashes a thing of the past. Eventually, they decided they couldn’t do it, and bought an operating system that could: NextStep, based on Unix. After a few more years of retrofitting (this time, to make NextStep work more like the old Mac OS), Mac OS X was born and there was a sudden outbreak of stability.
Relative stability that is. There are still problems to be found, some easy to come across, others well hidden. Trouble is, even by the best estimates, around 5% of any computer program has bugs. That means that, charitably, Mac OS X probably has 50,000 bugs or so, waiting to be found. Some already have been, but at any moment, you could be the next lucky Mac user to discover a problem.
Fortunately, there are easy ways to combat these problems and even prevent them – if you read on, anyway.
Most things people stumble over are not usually that hard to solve. They’re often just an inability on the part of computer programmers to realise that what they thought was really, really obvious isn’t so obvious to the rest of us. Who, for instance, though that moving a CD to the Trash was the best way to eject a CD?
But what of that stuck disk that refuses to eject? There’s no eject button on most Mac CD drives, unlike on PCs, so there’s no “hard eject” mechanism to force it to come out. That’s an actual problem. So how to fix it? The most common reason a CD won’t come out when you press the eject button on a keyboard is that it is still in use. You won’t find that out until you try the drag-to-the-trash method of ejecting, however: naughty Apple hasn’t put an error message in for when that method goes wrong, yet. But even so, what does “in use” mean? It could mean that iTunes is playing it. But it could also mean that there’s an application running off it, meaning you’ll have to quit the guilty application – or quit all your applications if you don’t know which one it is. At the absolute worst, you might have to restart your Mac, keeping the mouse button held down at start-up to force open the CD drive.
This, though, is easy stuff. Once you’ve reached a certain level of skill with OS X, it’s only the “odd things” and the things that are genuinely wrong that will give you any real bother. “Odd things” are different from person to person. To a Unix user, all the underlying ideas are easy in OS X; it’s finding what you want in the maze of graphics that are the problems. To a Windows user, it’s not having a Start button, or trying to open an application using the “Return” key. To a user of the old Mac OS operating system, it’s pressing the Apple key and N only to find that you get a new window instead of a new folder in OS X. But almost everyone tends to get confused by one particular new feature of OS X: permissions.
Back when the Mac was born, the idea that it would be anything except one individual’s personal computer was a far-off idea. Multi-user computers exposed to the world via the Internet were the realms of the US military and research labs, running high-end operating systems such as Unix. Even more so, the idea that a Mac user would have anything less than total control over his or her computer and be told what to do by it was anathema to Apple. So the Mac let its user do just about anything he or she wanted to, short of deleting the entire operating system.
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