APM Partition Boots Intel Macs

I'd thought that if you wanted to boot Intel Macs you needed to use the recently available GUID partition table, mainly because that's what it says in Disk Utility when you format the drive. In fact, as it turns out (at least as of Mac OS X 10.5.5), using the Apple Partition Map (APM) boots Intel Macs perfectly well. It's exceedingly useful to have a partition format that will boot both architectures, particularly at the museum, where Intel and PPC Macs still very much coexist.

In fact, my Mac is a G5, but all the new hardware is, of course, Intel-based. And I'm trying to create a master build image for setting up new machines. Generally the way I do this is by making a test build on a firewire partition. I can boot into this build and tweak it until it's perfect. And when it is, I image it to an ASR disk image for NetBooting. I was worried that architecture limitations would make this painful — that booting into my test build partition would be impossible on my PPC Mac because of these restrictions. Glad to know I can just use the old reliable APM for everything and it'll do what I need.

Not sure when or how they worked this out, or why the language in Disk Utility has gone unchanged. That fact does give me pause. But so far booting Intel Macs from APM partitions has worked perfectly for me on multiple machines.

UPDATE:

More info at Apple's Secrets of the GPT Tech Note, via Jeff in the comments.

Spotlight Sort Options

While Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.5 is greatly improved, there is one area in which it has regressed to an unusable state. Sort options in Leopard's Spotlight are limited to only three fields: Name, Kind and Last Opened. Uh... This is bad, guys...

For most quickie finds I'll usually turn to the Spotlight menubar item. And this usually gets the job done. But every now and then I need to create a more complex search, and for that I'll typically turn to the "command-f" Finder method. Again, there are many useful advantages in Leopard over Tiger when it comes to this sort of search, most notably the nested search properties. These allow Spotlight in Leopard to create searches of Byzantine complexity. Astoundingly, the results will only be sortable by the aforementioned criteria. Need to look at your "Date Created" search by "Date Created?" Too bad. Guess you're shit out of luck.

Smart folders never looked so dumb.

This has been posted about The Internets for some time now, mentioned recently in this fine MacOSXHints post, and now listed as one of that site's author's most glaring problems in Leopard. I must admit, I haven't needed this functionality until recently — very late in Leopard's release — which is why I'm only noticing it now. But boy, when you do need it, it's shocking to discover this constraint in an otherwise greatly improved tool.

It kills me when a company takes one step forward and another back like this. I really hope Apple fixes this shortcoming sooner rather than later.

Leopard umask

This is one of those I-keep-forgetting-how-to-do-this posts, so I'm writing it down. It's certainly been posted elsewhere, but I'm tired of going looking every time I need it. So here it is. In Tiger a simple defaults command could be used to modify a user's umask (a setting that controls the default permissions for newly created files and folders). Leopard, however, changes the way this is done. Leopard instead uses a launchd configuration file. To create a custom umask for all users of a system (i.e. all user-level processes):

1. Create a file called launchd-user.conf.
2. Place the file in /etc/
3. Enter the property, then the umask setting in the file, like so: umask 002
4. Restart the machine.

The restart may not be necessary, but if I recall it was the only way I could get it to work. If you don't want to reboot, you'll at least need to restart launchd and any application or process you want to use the new setting. Rebooting, though, is a nice catch-all.

Some additional info: if you want virtually all applications (i.e. system-level processes) to use a custom umask, you can leave the "user" off the file name. Using /etc/launchd.conf will have said affect, but it is not recommended by Apple (or me for that matter).

Setting a custom umask in general isn't something I recommend either, but it's damn handy in certain file sharing environments in which multiple users need access to the same stuff, but where ACLs — the preferred method for setting up complex file sharing permission sets — aren't an option. Creating a common group for the users and setting up their umask to create files and folders that are group-writable is an acceptable workaround in many scenarios. Which, by the way, is what the above setting will do. A umask of 002 will create files with permissions of 775 (the opposite of 002 — it's a mask, silly).

Okay then. Happy umasking!

Leopard Bugaboos

As big a fan as I am of Leopard, there's always room for improvement. And, though I've covered my major gripes already, I've recently discovered some additional buggy behavior in Leopard.

Application Switching

For some time now, Mac OS X has had the ability to switch between applications using the handy command-tab key combo. This works in Leopard as it always has, but I continually encounter a UI problem when doing this. Let me describe an example: I open an application, and, as it opens, I command-tab to another one. When the first application finishes opening, its windows are now on top of the active application's windows. That is, it's possible, through command-tab application switching, to get into a state in which the active application's windows are completely obscured by a recently opened application's windows. The easy solution is to quickly command-tab between the two apps. But it's pretty annoying when this happens: suddenly I find myself unable to work in an application I've just switched to. Is it a bug? I'd say yes.

UPDATE: I've just discovered that this happens not just when a new application has been opened, but also when switching to an app that has a recently activated process. For instance, in Firefox, I open a new window and then immediately switch to Mail, then back to Firefox again (hit command-tab twice rapidly). While Firefox attempts to open the window, it will appear to remain in the background, though the menubar will now clearly show that Firefox is, indeed, the active application. It seem like, during the time when Firefox is opening that new window (which on my aging Powerbook, takes a second), the OS can bring the app to the foreground, but is somehow unable to display the app's windows, and thus simply displays the windows of whatever app was up last. Ugliness!

Install and Keep Package

In Software Update there exists an option to "Install and Keep Package." When choosing this option, Software Update will download any selected updates, install them on your system and then save them to your hard drive for use later. I've often needed to do multiple installs of an update, and it's much faster to do so from disk, so I've used this as my preferred method of update. But this excellent feature just doesn't work for me in Leopard. In past versions of Mac OS X, these downloaded updates were stored in /Library/Packages. That folder is now gone. When I first installed Leopard, I noticed that "Install and Keep Package" downloaded updates to a different folder in /Library (perhaps /Library/Updates or /Library/Downloads, I don't recall). Then, for a time, the option downloaded updates to my ~/Downloads folder. But now choosing the option seemingly does nothing. The only way I can duplicate this functionality now is to use the "Download Only" option, and then, once the downloads are complete, choose the "Install" option. Using "Install and Keep Package" installs the software, but downloads nothing. Not a deal killer, but still frustrating.

Now I should mention that I keep my home folder on its own, separate partition. It's very possible that this is what's confusing Software Update, particularly considering the fact that Software Update now wants to download stuff to my home account (where it used to go somewhere globally accessible, i.e. in /Library). Still, given that this always worked flawlessly in Tiger, and that the "Download Only" option continues to work properly, I'd have to classify this as a bug.

Or at least a bugaboo.

Note To Self: Restart autofs

I just looked all over Hell's half acre for this (okay, I performed a perfunctory Google search) and I couldn't find a definitive answer. Now I know and I just wanted to make a quick note of it for posterity. In the olden days (i.e., a few months ago), in order to get any mounted to shares to re-mount, we would restart automount thusly:

sudo killall -HUP automount

This no longer works. Now we must restart autofs. To restart autofs on Mac, do this:

sudo killall -HUP autofsd

To be additionally thorough, though this should not be necessary, you could also restart automount, which now looks slightly different (note the "d", which is new):

sudo killall -HUP automountd

None of this is surprising, but then again, if you're not sure you're doing it right (like you run the command and nothing happens and you want to be sure you're doing the right thing) it helps to have it written down somewhere.

Enjoy!