“Apple released Mac OS X 10.3.6 last week on a post-election Friday afternoon, with little fanfare and the typical useful-but-sparse release notes. The company documents 22 changes in Mac OS X 10.3.6, which come from nearly 1,200 changed files in nearly 1,000 different directories or folders, many of them in large bundles or packages. Here’s a closer look at what Apple has told users about what’s inside the OS X update.” Read the article here.
A Closer Look at Apple’s OS X 10.3.6 Update
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Oh how I wished for SSL WebDav support in Finder when Panther came out.. oh how disapointed I was. I hope to God that I will get my wish when Tiger comes out. I don’t see why it’s not there already. WebDav is there just not SSL WebDav. Since .mac uses WebDav (from what I understand) I’m surprised they don’t use SSL and update Finder to support it.
Stuck using Goliath for now.. and Konqueror.. but I really wanna see this in Finder already!
You wish too much.
Even common ftp support is worth zero in Finder. And even more it’s state constantly changes between worse and nothing.
And you wish for ssl-webdav? Be happy with improved calculator.
There have been a load of problems with the 10.3.6 update– just read the Apple support discussions.
I am one of the unlucky as well. I’ve had continuous kernel panics– right now I reinstalled OS X, did the permissions repairs and such, and after that it still paniced continuously. Right now I’ve been working on it all night, and it has now been running for at least 10 minutes– a blessing. Currently typing this post in OS X
.
Apple cannot ignore the plethora of problems expressed by users. I hope they provide fixes soon. I find this simply unacceptable for a large company like Apple.
… zero for me.
It’s a mistery… or not?! 🙂
It seems that OS X itself doesn’t have problems after the update, but GarageBand segfaults when I open files almost always.
When I updated from 10.3.4 to 10.3.5, Panther was slower so I reinstalled it (I created partions with Crux PPC because Panther doesn’t create the 800k partition map) and I updated to 10.3.6.
I hope Apple will continue to support Panther since I payed for it and I cannot be productive after an update that’s supposed to fix bugs.
…I gained an extra 9GB of space on my Hard Drive. Weird or what!
Maybe I’m just lucky, but my (dual 2ghz) system’s noticably faster (screen draws, menus, popups, everything GUI really), and I’ve yet to experience a problem with it.
Well… Not totally true: Today I popped my ipod in its dock and when itunes came up, it froze, boosting all the fans up to full speed. But it’s done this one before the 10.6 update also, so I don’t see it as being related.
I feel bad for those experiencing problems, but it still sounds like a rather small number of people with problems, when compared to the number upgrading. Hopefully Apple can help y’all out soon with another update.
No problems here.
I’ve had no problems on any of my mac systems with 10.3.6
No problems so far …
No problems here either on my iBook, G4 Sawtooth, and Dual G5.
I had some strange crashing happen about a day after I put the update on my powerbook. I was using Photoshop and Safari and something about the two seemed to cause problems. Photoshop kept dying in odd ways at odd times (like, clicking File->Open). Then Safari started acting weird/slow/pinwheeling/etc. I dunno. I rebooted, and then everything seemed fine again. Very strange, though. Other than that, it has been fine.
My Starcraft CD.dmg mounted a little faster today on my iBook…MUST be the 10.3.6 🙂
Run diskwarrior, if you have kernel panic. I work for Academic Computing at U-Arts and diskwarrior fixes these issue 9 out 10 times.
I’m using 10.3.6 on a D 867 G4 & 933 G4 ibook and I’ve very upset with super slow start up times. Both machines have slowed down greatly since I updated. I think it mite have something to do with the large amount of fonts in FontBook, but 10.3.6 really upset me for this reason.
No noticable changes on my end, and no noticable problems.
…I gained an extra 9GB of space on my Hard Drive. Weird or what!
Probably some zombied process somewhere had allocated the space (or deleted a bunch of files using the space) but it wasn’t actually “freed” until that process was killed in the reboot.
The same goes with a lot of these speed increases, I suspect – the reboot has more to do with it than the actual update.
Wow my Powerbook has now dual processors and a G5–I love this 10.3.6 update!!
Ugh. Got two kernel panics since installing 10.3.6. Whereas 10.3.5 ran flawless with 40+ day uptimes. Apple clearly needs a better QA department.
For some reason Safari was not working, and I thought my neighbour had stopped my free “wireless”.
At the same time I was tweaking something in the WebCore (just for fun, and I thought it installed itself in /System/Library… frameworks without asking me). Firefox was working… Safari not…
Then it started working, and it seems I did not touched anything (XCode did not succeed building it anyway). So no problems here. I remmember restarting also, but I’m not sure whether that helped the situation.
I didn’t see any new features though…
Run diskwarrior, if you have kernel panic. I work for Academic Computing at U-Arts and diskwarrior fixes these issue 9 out 10 times.
I don’t have 70$ lying around… But yeah, I’ll ask around if people have DW.
I installed it at the same day it was released, no problems whatsoever, all apps work well that I use daily.
Oh yeah, Am i just imagining or is iTunes 4.7 slightly faster than 4.6? Feels that search works little faster in iTunes, also little faster in Finder? I use search alot… typically keeping Finder serach in “selection” which searches from the selected directory. For example if I wanna find pdf’s from my bloated Documents folder, i just type .pdf to search box 🙂
No problems on my end either (12″ Powerbook).
For some reason when I updated to 10.3.6, I was unable to use a refresh rate of 100 Hz at 1152xwhatever it is (I just switched to mac this past weekend…i’m used to the windows res of 1152×864). I updated straight from 10.3.0 though, since I had just installed Panther.
I can tell you one big change in my system. It doesn’t boot now. This comes after I finally managed to get my iPod working from the last bum iPod update. I still haven’t managed to get my mac up and going again after this last update, it doesn’t seem to recognize the boot drive, OF key combos aren’t getting me anywhere. Apple’s rep among my friends is going into the crapper, they can’t claim limited hardware makes them more stable anymore.
Still better than OS9 though…and going back to windows is not an option.
Geez, I filled out a bug report/request for functionality on Safari with the first beta(and within a week of its release) and its moronic 60s timeout. The timeout became very noticeable and annoying when using Safari on dialup.
Okay…
10.3.5 seriously corrupted my system, and caused me no end of grief. Even an archive and install didn’t solve all of the problems, though it did stop the contant KPs, but even then the system was wiggy and glitchy.
10.3.6 boots slower but I have most of my stability back. I still can’t burn a CD, launch Dreamweaver, and if I try to access a file on my other harddrive more than 45 minutes after a start/restart I still get the SBOD. But, the machine no longer crashes every time I try to restart it.
I think 10.3.6 will be a good release (because oh god, was 10.3.5 rotten!) but the level of havok I have means I need to do a complete wipe and reinstall.
Are you sure you’re not confused and referring to Windows?
Diablo II has become unusable under 10.3.6 in OpenGL Render mode. Many people have noticed this in diablo and blizzard forums.
The only problem I’ve had (ibook G4 1Ghz) is weird freezing. I was running itunes and surfing the web (as you do), and I would sometimes get complete system freezes for about 5-10 seconds or so. The mouse moved around fine, but music stopped/stuttered in itunes, and I couldn’t scroll or click on anything – completely unresponsive. Happened about 3-4 times. Haven’t seen it since.
Weird. Could be unrelated to 10.3.6, but I’ve never seen it before. The only other thing I was doing was using wget to download heaps of stuff off of a website (mirror mode).
No problems here, with any update since 10.3.3 (what my iBook came with)
Ben
how can so many people have so many different experiences?
upgrade your firmware if you have not already. if you are running it on an officially unsupported system, please do not complain, if you have a million hacks installed, please make that information available.
in short, you need to qualify your systems before we can consider your statements.
As I’m sure most of you know, OS updates are unlike any other type of update.
System files are being CHANGED. Libraries are being patched. Files may be added. Sometimes, very basic functions down to, and including the kernel are being changed.
Although you may OFTEN get away with it, I would suggest always, always, always, perform these steps:
1) Quit all applications.
2) Verify HD (Disk check, fsck, etc) / Correct permissions.
3) Correct permissions.
4) Don’t perform any downloads except the OS update(s) you are performing.
5) Close the browser after the download(s) are complete.
6) Disconnect FW HD’s if possible (no, this shouldn’t be necessary, but…).
It wouldn’t hurt to disconnect all external / plug-in peripherals.
Don’t leave any media in optical drives, zip drives, etc.
7) Proceed.
This is at least the second OS X update that caused problems with attached FW hard drives. It’s now past time to be paranoid about this. Take precautions!
Personal experience? 15″ PB. The update was smooth. No problems. For those with problems, I hope they’re resolved soon.
Myself