Spotting Snow Leopard

I just installed OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard, on the one Mac I routinely use.

So far there's not much to love to the experience other than it just works. But I've had that experience most of the time with the Mac.

Snow Leopard is the latest operating system release from Apple. It has several refinements and improvements; they just are more or less hidden and are meant more for developers and techies than end users to enjoy.

Some notes...it doesn't run on PowerPC systems (the processor that was used before Apple shifted to the Intel platform). The PowerMac G5 my toddler son uses will forever be locked in at OS X 10.5 at most.

SL is smaller than 10.5. Like 7 gig smaller (some people are saying they're getting more space reclaimed). Nice.

The installation was simple. A couple of clicks...sat there for twenty minutes...rebooted, done. And by a couple of clicks, I really mean a couple of clicks. Simple as they could make it.

There are some refinements to memory footprint (how much space is taken by the operating system, meaning more memory free for your applications).

There are baby steps towards running 64 bit applications. Apple is mixing things slowly here...the default kernel for the operating system is 32 bit on most systems. You can force it to boot to 64 bit mode by holding the 6 and 4 keys at startup. First, though, you have to be aware that some of the drivers won't work with that mode so you'll lose some functionality if you try that. Not that it's a big deal. The only real reason I've ever found for running 64 bit operating systems is to address gobs of memory (by today's standards)...over 4 gig in your machine, you need a 64 bit operating system. Most home users don't have this worry.

OS X now has some simple anti-malware built in. I guess it will download updates from Apple to scan for them automatically, but really I consider this to be a bit of ineffective fluff.

There is some criticism I heard on MacOS Ken about the 10.6 system being considered insecure because it doesn't do address randomization. Basically, if portions of a program are in a known location of memory then malware...bad stuff...can easily find portions that are vulnerable and target it for hacking. Malware overwrites part of a buffer, executes it, and "boing"...it takes over the computer. Address randomization uses techniques that make it impossible for user code to know where exactly other programs (or operating system components) are located in memory, and while Apple hints that they're working on this they don't currently have the ability in OS X. Windows has had this ability for quite some time and is the default ability of Vista. Not a huge concern right now but it would be nice to have that built in, much like the ability for current Macs to defrag files on the fly in the background (did you know it did that? Search for "On-the-fly" in the article).

Another disappointment, though, was that ZFS was dropped in Snow Leopard. Hints indicate Apple may still be working on it but they haven't commented on the lack of it despite early beta work on integrating the filesystem drivers. Some speculate it's a licensing issue. It's a largely cool filesystem that has a lot of REALLY NEAT features...really hoping Sun Microsystems gets their heads out of their colons and open sources it.

Overall, Snow Leopard is faster and more responsive and is largely a foundation improvement over previous versions of OS X. There's a lot of under-the-hood work done and Apple knows there's not a lot for end users to drool over; they priced it at only $30. Wow! They wanted users to have incentive to install it for the enhancements probably to ease a transition into something more drastic down the road, and judging from the number of hidden changes (see the Wiki article at the beginning of this post if you're interested) the next iteration of the cat will be something quite interesting...