joseaguilar.org

Third Time’s a Charm

May 27, 2008 on 9:44 pm | In Apple, Mac OS X |

Today I ran into this article named Mac OS X 10.5.3 about to hit. It listed all the bug fixes that are going to be included in the soon-to-be released OSX 10.5.3 update. I can tell you that I’ve never been so anxious about an OSX update as this one. The gods at cupertino, however, seem to have heard our pleas, and are fixing a couple of @#$@# annoying bugs that have my user experience with Apple products very frustrating (to put it mildy) ever since I upgraded to a MacBook last January.

The first issue that seems to be resolved is listed as “Joining AirPort network after wake issue resolved”. This is an issue that has been known for months, is incredibly frustrating, and the workaround takes a long time to perform. It turns out that on Santa Rosa based Macs, sometimes when you wake your computer from sleep (or reboot it), it will simply NOT be able to connect to your selected Airport network. You’ll only get a Connection Timeout error message. You cannot even begin to imagine how infuriating this is, specially if you are in a hurry or are expecting an important email. It turns out that the culprit is actually the OSX Keychain (I know… :S), and the workaround involves several steps:

• Turn Airport Off
• Go to the Network Preferences Panel, and DELETE the network you were trying to connect to
• Go to the folder Library:Preferences:System Configuration and DELETE the file com.apple.airport.preferences.plist (enter your password if prompted)
• Open Keychain Access and DELETE the entries for the networks you were trying to connect to. Make sure you delete them in both the login and system keychains.
• Restart your computer
• Try to connect. At this point, it may still fail. If it does, open Safari and try to access any webpage. You’ll get a page with a button to access the Network Diagnostics utility. Use it, and connect to the network from there

So, you can see it takes close to forever to restore your network connectivity. And sometimes you need to do it twice, as you may have missed a step. Hopefully this will be gone after the update. This bug is well documented here and here and here.

The other issue, hopefully, will be solved by the fix “Fix to CoreGraphics and DVD Player” has to do with DVD playback. This is actually worse, and it basically consists in the MacBook CRASHING when you try to play a DVD. This only seems to happen on Santa Rosa-based MacBooks with 4GB of RAM. This one isn’t as frustrating, as you only need to NOT use your MacBook to watch DVDs. Still, it should have been fixed a while back. This is documented in this thread at MacRumors.