Re: Tiger taming (was Format HDD)

In article <yMV8f.4283$kj6.4005@trndny03>,
"name" <vze4j6mv@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]

> the version of Tiger I have is a little buggy. For example, in Safari
> if I try to customize the address bar by dragging the stop/reload button to
> the address bar it won't stick, other buttons stick, but not that one.

Possibly that user's prefs file is corrupted. If the problem doesn't
exist in a newly created account, for sure it is something like that -
nothing to do with the system.

> Also, after installing Stuffit it opens with an error and I have to close
> it.

By itself no indication that there is a problem with the system, let
alone with the OS version. If you disclose which version of Stuffit (and
"Expander" or "DeLuxe"?) and what the error number/message is, someone
may be able to say something useful.

> And, connecting to a windows machine was a real pain. If I go to
> Finder/Go/Connect to Server I can't connect to a Windows machine on my home
> network. The only way I could do it was to add another administative user
> to my windows machine then go to Finder/Go/Connect to Server, then go to
> browse to find the windows machine and enter the Samba user and password.

I never use smb, but Apple made a big deal out of how newer OS X
versions were much better at it. So my guess would be that something
about your setup (be it your Tiger configuration, or something else on
the network) is not configured as it should be.

> All of the above I did not have a problem with in Jaguar. And my guess is
> that there may be other problems.

Of course there are problems in current versions of products ;) More
interesting is that there were also plenty of problems in Jaguar that
Apple fixed in Panther and even more so in Tiger. Not to mention that
Panther's GUI was much fatser than Jaguar, especially on 'older'
machines, and Tiger's is even a bit faster than Panther.

> What I really want to know is there a boot disk similar to a Windows boot
> disk where I can add/delete/format partitions for a mac, or are these only
> done with the OS install cds?

That's what /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility is for (also available
from wihtin the OS installer), provided the disk you target is not the
startup disk, nor the disk containing Disk Utility. In practice, that
means the OS install disk is a good candidate. But you could do it from
another disk, or from a custom made CD. ("BootCD" makes it easy to
create bootable CDs.)

> BTW, I really like Macs, I love the BSD foundation as I am familiar with
> Unix, but I not that thrilled with Macs gui, for one thing, I could really
> do without that Dock. I know you can autohide it, but I wish there was an
> option to disable it.

Yes, the Dock has some serious design problems. I wouldn't call the Dock
part of the Mac GUI though. It's just an application. The only thing
special about it is that you can't (easily) keep it from running.

FWIW, I have learned to live with the Dock by
[1] setting it to dock from the top-right of the screen (third-party app
TinkerTool can help with that)
[2] making it quite small,
and most importantly, by
[3] not having it double as a launcher, so it only shows running
applications

Thus it is only there for me to see from the corner of my eye which apps
are running. If I wouldn't sometimes find it practical to drop stuff on
Dock icons from the Finder (to open things) I would probably set it to
autohide, or even do my best to kill it completely.

Actually, no, that's not true. Some applications offer useful things
through their Dock icons. For example, URLM lets me access my bookmarks
through its Dock icon, so I don't need to waste menubar space on that.
It can also be useful when you want to switch to a particular window in
another app: Ctrl-click its Dock icon to be able to go to that window
immediatelu (and not activatng its other windows - although that sort of
subtelty differs per app).

> And finally, I've tried all the keyboard combos, but I think you're right
> Jaguar is too old for this machine.

Not Jaguar. Just anything pre-10.2.3. ("Jaguar" refers to 10.2.x.)

--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

Mac user: "Macs only have 40 viruses, tops!"
PC user: "SEE! Not even the virus writers support Macs!"
.

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