Based on this article it looks like the upcoming Mac OS X 10.3.7 update right now focuses on FireWire Audio, Graphics and Postscript.
Mac OS X 10.3.7 Details
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Great scott! This is great news. Updated drivers, MLAN audio support… whats not to like!!!
😀 Keep up the good work apple. Nice to see a well revised OS out there.
It’s a well revised OS, for sure, but they definitelty should’ve done more testing on the 10.3.6 update– heaps of problems for a lot of people. I have re-installed my Mac three times now. I now resort to 10.3.0 and I will not touch any Aple update untill Tiger comes out.
Just a precaution.
I think it is great that Apple puts so much effort into drivers. You don’t (can’t) see that with Windows. Not enough hardware standardization. The flip side, is that you don’t always get the cost performance ratio of a winbox. But I like the fact, that I don’t even know how (or have to) learn how to add drivers just to get the motherboard chipset working !! Hhahahahahah
Man, Apple is simply on fire. Great to see the passion for constant improvement.
kaiwai, I suggest you lower your tone and show a bit more respect. I’m not the only one having problems. And besides that, I’m more than experienced enough to know what I’m doing.
Check tha Apple.com forums for crying out loud, and then come back, before screaming nonsense like “no one else has problems”.
Listen sunshine. I’ve checked out the forums, and 99% Of people bought the missery upon themselves; there is one poor soul who upgraded from 10.2.8 to 10.3.0, applied 10.3.6 and is now complaining that everything is up the poop.
Sorry, these are people that have bought the missery upon themselves. I’ll stand by what I said, if you’re running MacOS 10.3.5 and updated, you won’t have a problem.
I’ve got an iBook and eMac, both upgraded differently to 10.3.6 and neither of them exhibit and unsual behaviour, both of them are rock solid and running nicely.
This is as bad as service pack 2, with people whining that their 20 year old piece of software isn’t working, and they’re too cheap to purchase a new version of it.
As I said, if the majority of people are upgrading their machines without any problems and only YOU and a few whiners are having problems, the first port of call is to blame yourself; look through your system configuration and ask whether some of the weird and exotic crap installed is causing problems.
More info is on my blog here:
My new blog:
http://thom-holwerda.blogspot.com/
My old blog:
http://slashdot.org/~thom%20Holwerda/journal
There’s more than enough info on my problems there.
Dude, my iMac was FRESH and NEW when I upgraded– you have absolutely NO IDEA of the circumstances involved here. YOU are being ignorant. Yes, Apple is a great company, but there’s no problem in acknowledgeing that THEY also make ERRORS.
Get over it, dude.
Here’s an overview.
I first upgraded from 10.3.5 to 10.3.6. Did the usual permissions and disk repairs, unplugged all 3rd party USB devices, and shut down all programs and services I didn’t need. First two days, all was peachy. Then, I dropped into my first kernel panic loop. Many more were to come. This is what I did.
I zero’d my drive, did a clean install of 10.3.0, let it run for a while to see if any panics occured. They didn’t. I again did the disk/perm. repairs before and after applying the combo 10.3.6 update. Suddenly, the kernel panics came back. I experienced many more panic loops.
And NO, it is not a hardware problem either. My iMac has been fully tested for hardware malfunction by my Apple Store for a week, a few days before 10.3.6 came out. They didn’t find ANY errors in my hardware.
Do you now see why it MUST be 10.3.6? I have now been running 10.3.0 for a few days, without ANY problems or whatsoever. Now, please reconsider your unfounded accusations of it being MY fault.
There are more people on the international Apple forums complainging about 10.3.6. According to you, they are all liars and losers. NONSENSE. And even if they upgraded without the repairs and such, and WITH programs running/installed; it’s simply UNNACCEPTABLE that a company like Apple, which is lauded for its userfriendlyness, allows these things to happen. Period.
While I normally don’t agree with what Thom says, this time I think he’s right.
The 10.3.6 update is kinda buggy and i’ve had it kernel panic on me when I did the update from 10.3.5. That pretty much screwed up the system and I had to reinstall everything from scratch.
Updating from 10.3.3 (which is what my Powerbook ships with) went alright.
10.35 was also a buggy update. Do you use the incremental upgrader or the combo?
If you are on dial-up you pretty much use the incremental.
Go over to Applelinks.com and read some of Moore’s mailbag. You will see that the updates from Apple have been very buggy. If you are lucky, great, but please remember Apple is the one that come up with the “It just works” slogan.
Lastly look on the medicine cabinet for:
a) Blood pressure medication
b) a CHILL PILL
I do every update on my powerbook 12″, and I never got any bug …
Might have to do with the fact that I unplugged all non-Apple USB devices
There’s your problem. Yes it’s not fun to have to unplug them, but if you have USB devices plugged in, you will probably find those are the source of the kernel panic. Narrow down the problem to one USB device and then see if you can get updated drivers. If not complain to the manufacturer, or consider whether you really need that USB device.
I too upgraded from 10.3.5 with no problems.
I’ve tried with and without USB devices.
After so many trial and error I’m giving up on the 10.3.6 update. Better luck next time.
Installed all the upgrades on 3 different machines (original G3 iMac, eMac and 15″ powerbook and have yet have to have any kernel panics or other crashes for the last year (I guess fingers crossed).
Never done a permission and/or disk repair. Is that something that should be done after every upgrade?
I’ve updated about 15 machines at home (G3 B&W, G4 400, iBook G3 700) and at work (2 G3 500 iBooks, G5 1.6, G4 Dual 500, iMac 600mhz, etc…), and had not a SINGLE problem with the 10.3.6 update.
I’d echo other remarks about looking at what hardware you have attached and what software you are running.
Most often, Kernel panics come from badly written drivers.
It could also be sub-standard third party RAM.
Apple pushed the performance of 10.3.6 by re-writing parts of the Kernel. Perhaps RAM that worked fine with older and less optimized versions of the OS fail with newer ones.
We had this same experience moving from DOS 6 and Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.x and Windows 95.
I’d remove ALL third party hardware AND RAM and see if the system stays stable. THEN, I’d add pieces back one by one until I found the culprit.
A P.I.T.A. I know…
But, before I’d make a moral value judgement on the software, I’d get the data.
Of course, one CAN say that the 10.3.6 upgrade is the culprit using the logic that someone here used…
But… The question is, is it the Upgrade that did something wrong, or did it expose a heretofor unknown hardware fault?
I have mever ever had an issue with updates. Never. 400MHz G4 OS X Server at home no issue. 2 12″ 800MHz iBooks at home no issue. A production dual 1GHz G4 machine at work with 8 USB devices attached to it at all times and still not one issue. Those machines also get abused. None of them get powered down, usually they all have uptimes from update to update without a restart. The iBooks get used by 6 different people logging in and out. The server is always up running web ftp telnet vnc etc. services with a couple hundred hits a day. All the machines at home have generic chepo ram installed. The pro machine at work has large large format digital priners, vinyl plotters, 2 scanners, 3 small inkets, external floppy, external zip, 5 firewire drives, a graphics tablet, a media card reader and 3 key dongles and it runs ftp web and ssh services and serves a FileMaker Pro DB to 10 other machines in the shop and still no issues with updates. All I do for maintenance is every 3 or 3 months I take the machines out back and blow the insides out with my air hose, reseat all my connections and never use the cd/dvd tray as a cup holder
. Software wise I repair my permissions every few weeks and have macaroni take care of the rest. It is not that hard and anyone can do this.
Apple like most software companies does not produce a perfect flawless update for everyone. There are some issues that I’ve read with 10.3.6 and certain firewire hdds, wee data loss, and so on.
I personally haven’t had any problems on my 12″ Powerbook, with 10.3.6, not to say there aren’t any. Apple makes great products, but they do not produce perfect hardware or software, no one does. For example, this past Oct. my 12″ Powerbook (1.33GHz model) started having white spots on the screen and it was barely two months old. So I shipped it out and within three days (includes shipping time) my powerbook returned with a new LCD screen. I haven’t had a problem since and still pretty impressed by the repair time. Just my two cents…
Never done it, and everything just keeps on working. I have a 17″ PB and 15″ PB, all just works great.
You do not need to run perm check every single day or basically EVER, unless you have been messing with the system as root
Can I offer some ‘me too’ to Thom? I had problems also with 10.3.6, but none with 10.3.5. Now, I use custom themes, using ThemeChanger, so that very well could be the problem with mine. But, for the symptoms: I upgraded because the documentation stated that they fixed a bug which caused PowerBooks to stop responding on wakeup periodically, and I experienced that twice before. However, after the update, it stopped responding a lot more (I counted 7 times in 2 days), for 10 seconds at a time. I’m not exactly sure what the problem was, just that using the exact same configuration as 10.3.5 on 10.3.6 caused those hangups. So, I switched back to 10.3.5, and haven’t had a problem since.
Oh, that same thing (the pausing for 10 seconds) happen(ed,s) when opening an incomplete file with VLC, and never was able to track down the problem.
Therefore, I will not be upgrading to 10.3.6, probably not 10.3.7, because it Works For Me (TM).
Conclusion: Kaiwaii: TAKE A SMEGGING CHILL PILL! Sure, my problem very well could have been caused by me, but 10.3.5 worked with my changes, 10.3.6 doesn’t, and I don’t have the time or care to try to fix it.
“Therefore, I will not be upgrading to 10.3.6, probably not 10.3.7, because it Works For Me (TM).”
It’s your problem. You don’t know what you miss. 🙂
Oh, let me say a think: a Mac (and a PC too) is like a partner; love it and it doesn’t leave you alone. If you hava a problem you doesn’t love your Mac enough. I love my iBook. I clean it, I check it, I control it etc etc. It knows I love it very much and I have never a bug with any update. 😀
I know what I’m missing, and most of 10.3.6 is nice, but 10.3.6 just won’t work right with my setup. Maybe when I have time to really diagnose the problem, I’ll fix it, but I can wait until 10.4, and then I’ll want to make the time to fix any problems with it. Until then, 10.3.5 works fine.
10.3.6 is a pretty good update but they really screwed something up with the FireWire support. Many people are having problems mounting FireWire hard drives. I personaly have problems with my analog to digital video converter which connects to the Mac by FireWire, before 10.3.6 I could import to DV just fine and now every few seconds it skips a frame or two.
I suggest if you have any problems with 10.3.6 that you submit a report with Apple at:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/
Another thing people might try having problems with ANY MacOS X Revision is doing an Open Firmware Update:
Boot up holding down the Open Apple + O + F keys until you see a white screen with black text.
Type:
Reset-nvram
set-defaults
reset-all
and then it will reboot.
This often fixes Kernel Panic problems.
I just bought a new d 1.8 G5, my only two issue are 1 the low amount of ram and 2 I have to pay the full cost of tiger 10.4 when it comes out. I just paid $2,000 for a system with 256mb of ram and I have to shell out a another $130 in a few months.
Also did that already
. Didn’t fix my 10.3.6 problems though.
That is one reason I am waiting for Tiger to be released before I replace my G4 iMac with a new G5.
On my Beige G3 (with G4 ZIF 533) I just installed 10.3 and updated to 10.3.6. No panics and boots in under a minute. Scores a 51 on xbench which is no speed demon but very usable and not far behind my iBook 1ghz G4.
Not bad for an unsupported machine.
I wasn’t having kernel panics, but shortly after installing I was getting random crashes in certain apps like Safari and Photoshop in particular. I also had XCode just up and disappear on me while I was busy typing a line of code. Annoying to say the least. This is the first update I’ve ever had trouble with.
However, and while I hesitate to declare victory, I may have managed to get things sorted out. I deleted the following folders and then rebooted:
/Library/Caches
/Users/<myusername>/Library/Caches
/System/Library/Caches
The reboot took awhile as it seemed to be building up caches, but ever since then (monday) I’ve had no problems and sometimes I swear my whole system feels slightly more snappy. I noticed while going through those folders that there were many things in there for apps I hadn’t used in a long time. In some cases, I had even trashed the app. There might be a problem with the OS not cleaning up those caching folders, I’m not sure. In any case, I’ve seen no ill effects from doing this as OSX simply recreated and repopulated the folders upon reboot with whatever stuff it needed in there. Only now it isn’t so filled with cruft. I should also note it freed quite a chunk of disk space (over 100MB in my case, although as it rebuilds the caches that drops some, of course).
Worth a shot for those having odd problems.
You don’t HAVE to pay for Tiger, you don’t have to upgrade. Plus, I think Apple sells upgrade CDs for €30.
Anyway, €130 is much cheaper than Windows XP Pro which is about €250.
i had a Kernel panic on my emac (first one ever) after upgrading to 10.3.6. its been fine since, but kind of strange that this never happened before 10.3.6.
Dood, it’s not like Apple never put out a bad or buggy update.
For me 10.3.5 was a nightmare that I’m still not done with. Installing 10.3.6 helped a lot, but I still have to make time this weekend to figure out out the path I want to take to deal with the incredible mess that 10.3.5 made of my main machine.
And I mean that 10.3.5 made such a mess of things on my dual 867 that even an archive and install back to 10.3 didn’t solve the problems. Apple’s does release crufty updates from time to time.
Thom’s not an idiot. He’s a really smart guy (although I don’t always agree with him). 10.3.6 has helped me a lot, but I believe him when he says it’s not playing well with his hardware.
I’m in charge of several macs, and none have had problems with any of the 10.3.x updates. One is a server, three are heavily- used workstations that are used daily for many uses.. one is a dual-G4 with a custom built Apache install. Works great. One is a thin client iMac blueberry that went from 10.3.0 to 10.3.6 with no hitches. Two were upgraded from jag to panther with no problems. Not sure why some other people are having problems.. maybe downloading too much porn?
no problem here, I’m running XP with Firefox!
Sorry to here the hit and miss problems. I haven’t updated my iMac in a year and it’s running fine, but than again, I never have problems with my mac as much as my pc.
Personally, I always apply Apple’s updates as a purge and clean install. For example, when a Panther update comes out, I:
-download the combo updater & burn it to CD
-backup my files
-slick (format) the drive
-reinstall Mac OS X 10.3
-apply the combo update
-apply any remaining updates through Software Updates
-reinstall 3rd party apps and restore my files
Since I am the only user on my Mac, all 3rd party applications are installed in ~/Applications to keep them separated. Why there? Because according to Apple’s documentation:
“When a user account is created, an Applications directory is not automatically added to the home directory. However, users can create an Applications directory and put their own applications in it. The system automatically searches for applications in this location.”
You can read this at:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPFileSy…
is there a way to add a network path for applications?
“For me 10.3.5 was a nightmare…”
(sigh) Damn, Kady, that’s the exact opposite of what I want to hear in a Mac thread.
I’ve been considering getting a Mac. In the this forum I’d been led to believe that Macs do “just work”. “Nightmare” contrats sharply with the usual glowing praise for Macs in here. The kind of problems people are having with updating doesn’t sound any different than the kinds of problems I run into with Linux, BSD, BeOS, etc. Seriously, all Linux vs. OS X wars aside, is there no escape from the types of headaches only computers can deliver?
is there no escape from the types of headaches only computers can deliver?
On OSX: Apple menu -> shutdown -> shutdown
On Windows: Start -> shutdown -> okay
On BeOS: Be Menu -> shutdown
Etc.
Funny. So have you found your Imac to be a good investment? Satisfied with the machine?
Yes, other than the problems I just mentioned, I’m more than satisfied with my iMac.
On OSX: Apple menu -> shutdown -> shutdown>>
Except that one of the problems I’m still dealing with is the fact that my machine freezes every time I try to shutdown or restart.
I have no escape.
(Okay, there is that hold in the powerbutton for about 30 seconds thing …)
—
And everybody, until 10.3.5 I had no software related problems with my PowerMac. And I’ve only had 10.3.5 problems on my dual 867. My 1999 iMac and 2001 iBook run just fine under 10.3.5
and on GNOME, foot -> log out -> shutdown -> OK…
You know, when you get used to do things the OS X way, you can’t turn back; it´s like the dark side of the force.
But I don’t have any firewire, usb, bluetooth, device. (ok I’ve got an USB mouse).
Other than that, every upgrade has been a pleasure.
Get it, you won’t regret that.