TUAW: So the other night, […] we had a problem with Jason Calacanis’s Powerbook G4. It would boot and run through the loading Mac OS X screen very quickly, but at the point where it was supposed to load the login screen, we were greeted by the default blue OS X background and the mouse pointer arrow and nothing else. And it just stayed there.
Long story short, they got the Powerbook back on its feet with five lines in a Unix terminal. With rather intuitive module names like fsck and mv. Mount was also used but that’s OK because it sound vulgar. My point? The OS X box got itself into a state where it was unusable. It had to be bailed out. It needed a bunch of commands that only a tech would know; at least a level well beyond the point and click aspect of things.
Moral of the story? AppleHeads in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones through Windows.
Personally I like this for two reasons. One is that there continues to be a command prompt under the GUI in Apple land. One of the biggest gripes I had about the old Classic environment was that there was no command prompt whatsoever. That irked me. Going back to my first GUI of GEOS (on a C=64) there was always a hidden Geek layer to work in… not so with Apple. And since 10.0, I’ve been a fan of exposing the terminal: nice to know it has uses.
On the flip side however, I’m also amused that the person working on the Powerbook had to go through such lengths to get the box back up and running:
We tried rebooting, we tried zapping the PRAM, and we both booted into single user mode and booted the computer in target disk mode, attached to my laptop, and performed a disk check on the computer. No problems with the disk. The machine just wasn’t booting.
After throwing up my hands and proclaiming there to be some odd hardware failure, it suddenly hit me: maybe the login window preferences were borked. We booted into single user mode again (reboot and hold down the command s button). I ran all the commands that you have to run in order to write to the disk (/sbin/fsck -y followed by /sbin/mount -wu /). Then I ran:
cd Library
cd Preferences
mv com.apple.loginwindow.plist BACKUPcomappleloginwindowplist
What the hell is all that about? I mean props for an engineer’s foresight of having OS X back up the login window preferences, but um… why on earth are those getting borked in the first place??? At least often enough that the OS is aware of it and actively making backups? And how in the hell would someone know about this were it not for research online? I’m reasonably certain I didn’t see this in my Powerbook instruction manual. Never mind having to know about the PRAM, single user mode, target disk mode stuff. My oh my, that sounds very much like what we go through when fixing a PC.
No software – or hardware for that matter – has been perfected to the level of Zero Defects. Too many users out there causing errors between the chair and the monitor for that to ever happen!
If this were cliché land, which is Apple: the pot or the kettle?
I haven’t read the article, but from the excerpts you showed, I don’t see any evidence that the OS was making backups. The person doing the work made a backup in case she/he needed to go back to the old version.
I just like that there is an add/remove programs button on the pc… I’ve borked xp once and that was with msconfig… so I did system restor and whent on my way… I am still getting over the lack of a right mouse button on the g4 laptops:)
whoo! Good catch Tommy: yeah, he’s removed the existing preferences and saved a back up – I read it in reverse: that the OS was keeping a backup that he had to restore from, to get the thing to boot.
Even so, there’s still a huge learning curve at work here: a horked preference file that prevents login… interesting. Wonder if that’s exploitable, actually… huh.
@Tim – on the Mac, the whole app is typically confined to one “folder”. To uninstall something it *should* be as simple as pulling the whole application folder to the Trash can. However, most apps are still guilty of spewing preferences in a few location. Device drivers don’t often have a good uninstall story. Of course, this type of thing is also what allowed someone to swipe MS Office from a CompUSA demo machine: all of Office was sitting happily in one folder. Dragged it to an iPod and brought it home – I assume it worked OK, judging by how Apps work on the Mac.