Leopard: Incompatible third-party software and hardware (part 2)
More busted stuff.
[See part 1]
We continue to aggregate third-party software and hardware products that are incompatible with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) on some level (loss of some level of functionality, complete loss of functionality, causes other system issues, including conflicts with other applications, in inability to login/startup or something else). As previously noted, any incompatible third-party system software add-ons (especially those that reside in /System/Library or /Library) can cause significant issues such as an inability to finish the boot process or blockage of general system services. Incompatible third-party hardware devices can cause similar issues, as they often interact with kernel extensions (located in /System/Library/Extensions). The surefire way to avoid these issues from the get-go is to follow our recommendation (1, 2) to use an Archive and Install or Erase and Install process when installing Leopard. Most potentially offending items will be eliminated, and you can add them back as you see fit. This not only allows you to have a problem-free experience directly post-update, but also helps in isolating the issue (if you add third-party components back one by one).
We're also now seeing more clearly that third-party disk utilities can cause serious issues -- including disabling a volume's ability to boot -- if not adjusted to work properly with Leopard. Even tools that have been guaranteed compatibility with Leopard by the developer are causing problems for some readers. The best way to mitigate the impact of issues caused by these third-party disk utilities is to create a full system backup prior to running them.
Drive Genius MacFixIt reader Parker submitted this report to Porosoft, the developers of Drive Genius:
"Disk Utility on my HD indicated that the HD needed repair (I am running Leopard on a Power Mac G5). I rebooted from the Drive Genius CD, and ran repair, which was successful. When I tried to reboot my Power Mac, it kept rebooting from the CD rather than the HD. I held down 'option' on the next reboot, and only the CD showed (not the HD). I managed to remove the CD, rebooted, and got the dreaded flashing question mark -- it could not find the HD. I rebooted from the Leopard installation CD, ran Disk Utility from there, it found and repaired my HD, and my Power Mac is now running normally. What's the deal with Drive Genius and Leopard? Your FAQs say 'No problem,' but that's obviously not my experience."
iDefrag, iPartition Coriolis Systems says that its disk modification tools are rendered incompatible with Leopard due to a "kernel bug" in the operating system. A message to customers reads:
"To cut a long story short, both the final developer seed (9A559) and the release version of Leopard (9A581) appear to contain a kernel bug that causes the disk to stop responding. The symptoms of this problem are that our programs will stop making any progress with the task they are working on, and under some circumstances may beachball; additionally, the disk being used will no longer work until you restart your machine. This does not seem to happen with all disks on all systems, but it is easily reproduced on some of the machines we have here and does not happen from earlier Leopard developer seeds or from Tiger.
"As a result, we do not recommend running our software from Leopard at this time. The problem has been reported to Apple and we will be working to help them to track it down as swiftly as possible.
"In the meantime, if you wish to use iPartition or iDefrag on a machine with Leopard installed, please use the programs from a bootable CD or DVD created with CDMaker. Such discs are currently based on Tiger rather than Leopard, so the problem mentioned above will not occur. Note also that CDMaker is not presently able to create a bootable disc based on the Leopard install DVD. We have no plans to address this issue until we are certain that running iPartition and iDefrag from Leopard is safe for our customers."
"One final caveat is that we do not, at this time, have the official documentation for the new 'directory hard links' feature that is used by Time Machine. We have done a little investigation ourselves and we have no reason to suppose that the new feature will cause any problems, but until we have seen the official documentation (which, we are assured will be released soon) we recommend caution when manipulating volumes containing Time Machine back-ups."
Toast Titanium Several readers have reported problems burning discs with Toast 7.1.2 under Leopard. Dan writes:
"On my Mac intel mini Toast 7.1.2 will not burn DVD-R discs, errors out with a message 'could not record because of a Mac OS X error' ---- plus this 'Result Code = -13780'"
Richard Stout adds:
"I presume that I'm not the only one who has discovered that Roxio Toast version 7.12 doesn't appear to burn DVDs using Leopard. When attempting to do so, I get error message: Couldn't complete the last command because of a Mac OS Error Result Code = 13780."
We couldn't find any support documentation about this issue on Roxio's Web site.
M-Audio USB MIDI products These hardware peripherals appear to be Leopard-incompaible, A reader writes:
"My keyboard by m-audio is not recognized at all in both garage band and logic. I own a intel iMac. I installed leopard and waited two hours and that was it. The next day when I wanted to lay some tracks down I realized keyboard not responding in logic. So restarted, unpluged USB and restarted and that was the exact error that I recieved. I get bus power ok, but that is all. I went to m-audio site and I noticed that they had stated compatabilty issues with USB/midi products with leopard and that they are working on new driver update."
Mail.appetizer This is a Mail.app plug-in that, like many other plug-ins for the new versions of Apple applications included with Leopard, is now incompatible. A reader writes:
"I live by Mail.appetizer. Whenever someone in the office emails about free food or beer in the kitchen, I'm always the first one there. Unfortunately Mail.appetizer does not work in Leopard; I thought I'd give GrowlMail (a noble but inadequate substitute) a try, but it doesn't work, either. I believe that GrowlMail is still under active development so we may see a Leopard compatible version eventually, but I fear that we've lost Mail.appetizer forever."
Epson printers Some users are reporting problems with Epson printers, especially on PowerPC-based Macs running Leopard. John writes:
"I print on epson 4800 and 7600 printers. They run all day and night giving me wonderful prints all the time. When OS 10 came out a few years ago we had a problem with the printer drivers to work. Now leopard is here and here we go again. You can,t print on the epson 4800 and 7600 printers. I use 6 macs, G4 1.42 dual processors that feed 4 printers. I spent the last 2 days trying to set up the printers. Thank god that I installed Os 10.5 and a spare drive so that i could switch back to OS10.4.9. Epson has a driver for 10.5 but its only for intel macs, and i understand it is not a full version driver."
Canon CAPT printers The printing framework no longer works under Leopard. One reader writes:
"I have tried re-installing the driver but no go. Error message from the CAPT print monitor: 'fatal: Protocol plug-in parameter error.: 15850' Is there light at the end of this tunnel - or is it tiger that I see?"
CanonScan Lide 90 The CanonScan Lide 90 driver will reportedly not work with Leopard
RadioSHARK This add-on can cuase processor usage to spike. A reader writes:
"After installing Leopard yesterday I noted that both CPU cores are running at about 50% all the time. Using top and Activity Monitor I discovered that the "radioshark server" was running and using up a lot of CPU.
"So I killed that process. The CPU load immediately went to an idle state, with just a few percent load. After removing everything relating to RadioShark, the computer is running beautifully."
StuffIt The StuffIt contextual menu is again causing Finder re-draw issues. The solution is to remove the Stuffit Contextual Menu Item from the /Library/Contextual Menu Items folder and any StuffIt-related items from /Library/Frameworksor uninstall StuffIt altogether.
MacFixIt reader Peter writes:
"This time it's an odd redraw problem. With the contextual menu installed there is a little squares of screen space that don't redraw properly around the location of the arrow. It happens most when the arrow is in it's clock mode... the little spinning clock next to the arrow. It also happens a lot when the arrow is over a window that is scrolling or drawing. The worst is when it's a browser window."
Another reader adds:
"I had the same problems: Clean Install, everything worked fine. After migration of my old system, the only chance to startup was in Safe Mode. The boot problem persists after APE cleaning. Than I trashed the StuffIt 11 frameworks in the Folder Library/Frameworks. Than everything worked fine. Maybe another solution."
To reitirate our advice regarding StuffIt: stuff it.
D-Link AirPlus Extreme This and several other third-party wireless cards with Mac-specific drivers are broken under Leopard.
"I have a 3rd party wireless card, the D-Link AirPlus Xtreme G, DWL-G650. The card is recognied by Leopard on my PowerBook, However, the OWC wireless driver that worked perfectly well under Tiger no longer recognizes the card. OrangeWare told me they have no plans to update the driver. Interestingly, the KisMAC application recognizes the network, but cannot join it, stating there is a problem with my AirPort device."
Texas Instruments: Ti-SmartView V2.0M Incompatible with Leopard.
For further coverage, see the Leopard Hot Topic page.
Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.
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