mac osx the install from hell

i’ve had my share of os installs… from slackware to win 3.11 to knoppix hdinstall to colinux to win 95,98,2k,xp, and even vista!

mac osx is a whole nother beast! sure i’ve had to run chkdsk or scanddisk a few times with windows installs… but mac’s disc utility is worthless! first it cannot be run when the mac is started (huh?) and second when it finds an error (after running it off the install disk) it cannot fix anything!@

so the install disk does its thing, and then quits saying ‘install had errors, restart’. lol? what errors?!! ok restart and i find out you can enable an install log, thank you! install log tells me i got some hd errors.

http://www.geeklan.co.uk/?p=51
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2003030211331230

ok ok so i finds the errors… some overlapping nonsense… whatever… google for some answers and find if i just delete the dir with the bad files it should be cool.

of course this requires a few restarts, so in the process this emac i got has no eject button , its part of the keyboard (none on the drive itself). so after a restart where i need to boot back into old macos, i cant eject the damned dvd to stop it from booting the install disk. finally i get it to eject, but whoops, something fouls up and when starting the mac i get some blinking fucking globe icon! (real fuckin helpful). how about an error message people!?

http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/help/2/
so i find out i have to hold down ctrl+option+p+r or some such and that fixes it. next! boot back into and delete problem files.

finally got the installer past part 1. but look… i’m reasonable, i know printer drivers are a few mb, but this cannot take up 1gig just for printer drivers. and another 900mb for some non-english language files, which is cool, but i cant remove installing them ;\ so the install will be 2gig i think.

its now running, at first it says 30mins and my gullible brain says ‘awesome! mac is so much faster!’ then a few mins go by and reality sets in… now the clock says 50 mins. i’m not holding my breath.

bad things about install:
1. must be ran off the dvd, no network shared drive, no ftp, no iso, nothing but local/firewire dvd! (and it better be a mac drive too)
1.5. be nice if i could install this completely while running mac and just reboot after everything is installed and verified complete+checksummed.
2. upgrade 900mb of language files mandatory.
3. printer drivers are 1gig (but you can select individual drivers).
4. disc checker cant fix shit.
5. trying to load the utilities is slow as fuck. even microsoft loads itself into ramdisk for quick access.
6. verification of disk , its 2.8gigs… this is gonna take a while. (but it is important)
7. no option to eject the damn disk so you can restart
8. starts up looking like fucking regular osx so you dont know if its loading or not.
9. everything is invisible with stupid mouse spinwheel cursor (need to see what part fails)
10. nothing to read while install goes on (or even a pong game etc.)
11. fucking terrible options to select from to install… hole bunch of shit i want to deselect. ‘additional speech voices’ hah!
12. fucking itunes installs itself. hah!
13. if the install fails, the entire system wont run.

i’ve been using this mac osx 10.2.8 for about a week. lemme just take this time to rattle off some annoying shit.

1. any program you want to use will require 10.3 or 10.4 (no free updates from apple, and even apple’s shit like xcode (developer files for compiling your own software like gcc etc) requires the latter versions) (i know there are older versions of xcode, but they are also older gcc versions too so its all really old). also new shit like a useful SEARCH utility ’spotlight’ isnt backported to older versions. (maybe a 3rd party app named ‘launchbar’ is what i was looking for.)

2. navagating with keyboard only is almost impossible.

3. after you highlight an icon you want to run, pressing the enter key, one of the most used keys for opening files across all operating systems… opens the icon name up for renaming! option + O actually opens the file.

4. hitting the x button (which is on the left side of the app, i forgot how to change position) only closes the current window, not the program. i mean its cute on windows if you set one or two programs to ‘close to tray’ or so, but every fucking program?!?! double clicking the title bar hides to dock too. hitting the ‘maximize’ button only ‘maximizes’ height not width.

5. finder search sucks.

6. even as ‘admin’ i cant access some files, must sudo sh. cant figure out how to su root or i forgot the password ;\

7. dmg files are annoying

8. emac has no ps/2 ports. shutoff button is a bitch to reach. lack of manual buttons for doing things (adjusting monitor levels, turning monitor on/off, ejecting cdrom)

9. serious lack of right click support. serious lack of customizability. top rated mac programs (on versiontracker) for customizing are not even close to crappy microsoft ‘tweak ui’ (they duplicate system preferences).

10. general slowness, maybe there is some way of speeding this up, but just opening directories takes precious seconds (on 1ghz 256ram).

11. no start or go or programs tab on by default like some linux distros and windows. look, its a good idea to have quick access to programs. not just open mac hd, open applications folder, open utilities folder etcetc.

12. optimizing system, wtf that means.

ok install is over

it will restart in 30 secs… ok!
timer freezes at 28… ok?
restart! ok… nice timer.

first boot into 10.4 is slow as hell. but it looks better :)

mac osx setup assistant, boy that took some work, 3d welcome messages with lighting.

it wants a lot of personal info, and it wants to sell me this .mac.

software update is now downloading 140mb of 10.4.6 yay.

“With the Mac OS X 10.4.6 system software update, PowerPC-based Macs will restart twice, instead of once, after the initial installation.”

haha…..