The Finder complains it cannot read some of the files, and then it tells me it has 8.63 GB to copy. Trouble is, the source volume is only 5.34 GB in size. Looks like it's summing the size of all the files on the source volume, rather than the space used on the volume itself; a simple mistake, but still annoying.
More annoying is the fact that it's unobvious how to make a good backup. I can't use dump, because it doesn't understand HFS+. I cannot use cp or tar, because these will not get special files in /dev, nor do they understand how to restore the HFS+ resource forks. I expect cpio will suffer the same problems with resource forks.
Searches at Apple and Google suggest that indeed, MacOS X is an operating system that is incapable of doing a full backup and restore of itself, when installed in the recommended (HFS+) configuration, unless the end user installs additional software, which pretty much means shelling out more money for Retrospect. At least the people at Dantz should be pretty happy about this. I cannot emphasize just how pathetic this is. UNIX and MacOS "Classic" can both backup and restore themselves completely. Ironically, this makes MacOS X worse than the sum of it's parts.
According to this page, out of the box, MacOS X cannot back itself up, and one should install a perl module that includes "psync." This is what i am doing. I hope it works.
ifconfig en0 up, things come back OK.
After some poking around, part of the problem appears to be in /usr/include/TargetConditionals.h :
#define TARGET_OS_MAC 1
Apparently, the above line tells gcc to compile for MacOS 9. But i'm running MacOS X, and do not even have a MacOS 9 System Folder - this install of MacOS X has never been setup to run "Classic" applications.
When i change all the occurance so the above to:
#define TARGET_OS_MAC 0
...the compile proceeds, but it's still go some more problems...
I'm still trying to get MacOS X to swap on a raw device. I have a
second partition, 256 MB in size. From what i can tell from Apple's
Darwin docs, there's a process called dynamic_pager that
talks to the kernel and allocates swap areas based on need.
Of course, there's no man page for it. (Apple really needs to clean up the docs. Supposedly, this is version 10.1.3, but it feels like 10.0.1. It's functional and stable, but there are a lot of really obvious things wrong. Most of them are not serious, but still, it's a lot of really obvious stuff i do not expect to see in a x.1.3 release.
And there's no "swapctl" program, so i can't even do "swapctl -l" to see what i'm swapping on. In fact, as far as i can tell right now, there's no way from the CLI to tell where the machine is swapping.
Last night i double-clicked a huge text-file (a .smi file that MacOS tried to open with "Text Editor") and crashed the machine. I had to do Com-Con-Power. I had a session open from another host, and it was locked up. The machine responded to pings, but that was really it.
The mount command is ignore /etc/fstab. In NeXTSTEP 3.3 i
would use the NFSManager GUI. No such beastie in MacOS X. Grr.
update_prebinding (a component of the MacOS
Installer program) using over 300 MB of total memory (RAM + SWAP) while
finishing up the installation for the Developer tools. That can't be
healthy. Maybe that's why the "Optimizing Performance" drags on for ever.
And the OS installer just chugged right along, installing into the first UFS partition that it knew would never boot. Sigh.
After picking Demetri's (who has been running MacOS X for awhile) brain for awhile, i decided to make the primary partition HFS+ and the secondary (for swap) UFS.
I Ordered 512 MB (more) RAM today from MacGurus. This seems excessive. I'm beginning to consider switching to Darwin, X11R6 and good ol' TWM.
My main reason for using any version of MacOS at all is that i have a major dependency on Quicken, in order to keep books for my (tiny) corporation in a format my accountant can handle. There's a GNU equivalent, GNU Cash, but i really don't want to have to run GNOME, which GNU Cash requires.
Sigh. If i wasn't such a lame programmer, i'd try to write my own.
Speaking of Quicken, Quicken 2002 ("Built for MacOS X") refuses to install on the MacOS X (UFS) file system. It installed on the MacOS 9 (HFS+) disk i had handy, and then i was able to copy it over to the UFS file system.
All versions of Netscape i have tried exit after their splash screen. No error, nothing even resembling an explanation. I think gangleri doesn't have enough memory for them. I guess it's going to be Omniweb or kowtow to the evil empire (Microsquish) for IE, until i get more RAM. Sad, sad sad.
I'm already sick of seeing throbbing blue buttons.
Why isn't "Eject" called "Put Away"? Mac OS 9 had both, which isn't strictly necessary, but going with "Eject" means that the way i unmount a AppleShare volume (served from another host) means i select it and do "Eject." Guh.
Amazingly slow, particularly the installer. The system claims to have free RAM and lots (40%+) idle CPU. Maybe it's the IDE drive. Ugh. Maybe i should just run Darwin on it...
I think NeXTSTEP 3 was prettier. I mean, it's not like MacOS X is ugly. And i'm a freak and all because my desktop of choice is TWM. But still.
NeXTSTEP on the almost comparitively powerless 33 MHz Motorola 68040 in a older (circa 1995) NeXT Turboslab was a speed daemon compared to the 400 MHz G3 Each machine has 128 MB of RAM.
Except for its inherently-crippled IDE drive, gangleri, the PBG3 "Pismo" should be the fastest machine i have. Instead, it feels like the slowest. Sad.
$Id: MacOSX-journal.html,v 1.2 2002/09/01 10:33:43 johan Exp $