MacOS grief

I’ve been struggling far too much this week with the Mac update.  The local Mac shop was great: they got me the disc, then added a fresh MacOS Snow Leopard installation.  However, that means I’ve been getting to grips with the quirks of another OS.

The biggest single hassle was networking: it always takes a long time and several tries to pick up my wireless network, and it pops up a little window on screen which won’t go away until I’ve retried half a dozen times and got a connection.  That’s new: pre-update MacOS 10.4 networking “just worked” most of the time, and would be cured by a reboot when it failed.

At first when it kept failing, I thought there must be a problem with the signal, so I went through a lot of messing about, changing the SSID, the PSK, and trying with different forms of encryption and no encryption at all, and checking with the ‘phone that the router’s wifi was indeed working.  This seems to me a major failing.  It’s bad enough having to wait several minutes for a network, but I could live with that happening in background.  But having the wretched thing pop up on screen any time I’ve been to the kitchen or bathroom and it’s suspended, and having to deal with it manually, is a major imposition on my time 😦

There are other things that pop up annoyingly on screen.  When I ssh into my server (from the commandline in a terminal ferchrissake!) it opens a popup for my passphrase!  On the plus side, the Mac terminal has finally acquired tabs, bringing it somewhere more like into line with KDE and Gnome terminals (KDE is still the best of the three, because I can use the tabs without messing with focus).

One more minor inconvenience: fink for snow leopard is not really ready.  I installed it from source (the only available option), only to find it has only a tiny handful of packages, and nothing that I want from a package manager.  So far I’ve installed gnupg ‘by hand’, and will get around to postfix real soon now.