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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=847
10.2 Jaguar bag of tips and tricks
By Michael Flaminio, Insanely Great Mac
August 26th 2002
A small handful of Mac OS X 10.2 tidbits for your Monday pleasure
Now that you have kicked the tires of Mac OS X 10.2 last weekend, here are a few
tidbits worth trying or knowing.
Quartz Extreme:
Quartz Extreme is the new 2D video accelerator in 10.2 Apple states that Quartz
Extreme requires 16 MB of VRAM on a NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 MX, or
GeForce4 Ti or any AGP-based ATI RADEON graphics card. With that said, many Mac users
may want more tangible proof that they''re getting the Quartz Extreme punch.
I have a G4 with two displays connected, one that supports QE and the other doesn''t.
One test is to load up a DVD movie, then open the terminal application. Make the
terminal window slightly transparent and place the window over the terminal. You
should be able to see the DVD play through the terminal window on a QE display. For a
more specific test, check out a little program that will indicate QE status for all
displays in the Terminal.
SCSI CD-RW
External SCSI CD-RW is current not working in 10.2. I have a SCSI burner on a G4 and
it''s a no-go. Roxio acknowledges the problem and states: "Apple has made some changes
in Jaguar that affect how SCSI drives are recognized. After installing Mac OS 10.2, it
is possible the operating system will no longer see your drive as a CD recorder, only
as CD player. Toast depends on the driver information from the operating system to
determine the capabilities of a drive, and as such, will only see the drive as a CD
player. You will not be able to record discs with Toast. As this is a Mac OS 10.2
issue, it affects recording through DiscBurner and iTunes as well. We are working with
Apple to help them resolve this."
For me, I just decided to make the jump from SCSI and bought a cheap ATA CD-RW off of
ebay and picked a FireWire enclosure.
SMB Browsing
I''m finding 10.2 to work well with Windows file sharing. I haven''t tried connecting
to a Mac from a PC, but it seems to work well the other way around. The big change
with 10.2 is that now networked Windows computers can be found in the Connected
Servers browser, rather than needing to type in the server/volumes blindly. One
problem still exists, however. 10.2 can''t handle required password changes from the
PC server, which requires logging from a Windows box.
iChat
iChat is interesting. I never was much of an instant messenger, so I don''t have any
particular opinions of iChat over other IM''s. The one feature I really like is the
background chat application, allowing me to be available without having the iChat
client running. This keeps the client out of the way and when someone sends me a chat,
iChat fires up and off we go.
I''m not sure how to run a AIM chat room. I think you need to go into File/New Chat,
then View/Chat Option. Select Chat and type in a room name. I''ll sit in the room igm
today for those wanting to test out iChat. (If this isn''t the correct procedure, let
me know and I''ll get this updated.)
One other tip for iChat, you can change your iChat icon. Do this by opening up iChat,
and just drag an image onto your chat icon in the top right. A box should pop up that
will let you resize the image for correct fitting.
Transpartent Dock
This isn''t particularly new, but is one of my favorite OS X mods. A new version of
TransparentDock (2.0.1) from Free Range Mac is available for 10.2. This nifty mod
makes your dock background transparent. I prefer to have a black boarder around mine,
but you can configure it to look as if your icons are just floating on the desktop.
Install Options
In case you didn''t notice there are now three installation options for 10.2. You can
do the full clean install, and upgrade and a backup install. The backup install is
interesting because previously the only way to reinstall OS X was a full reinstall,
which meant you''d lose all your user information. Now with the backup-type install,
your user data will be transported from the old installation into the new one, making
life considerably easier. Good news.
Screen Saver Desktop
And finally, here''s an excellent tip from macosxhints.com. If you''re looking to
flex your Mac''s muscles, or really test out Quartz Extreme, try this one out. This
tip will place your screen saver on your desktop -- in full motion. Apple''s new
Flurry screen saver looks pretty nice, but I''m rather partial to Euphoria 10.0.1
from Terence M. Welsh.
Post your comments at:
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=847
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