***Update, and proposed solution posted at the end of this article now***
It goes without saying here, I am not a huge apple fan. I like the hardware design of the MPB's but I got a Mac because I wanted a new job that had a large Mac base. So I figured I would get a Mac, immerse myself in it and thus prove I wanted the job enough. Well it seemed to work. But I digress...
Since I am not a fan of the OS, it would also follow that I hated the application start utility. That damn little popup window from the dock that took ages when you clicked into a folder etc... So I saw the new launcher in Lion and had to have it. Despite its iPhone feel. Well my readers and friends, I wasted $30 bucks.
Since installing Lion, no scratch that, since before the install things went very wrong! To get started, I had an installer telling my my selected (and only hard disk) was not a startup disk. No amount of disk utility repairs would fix this.... so I had to reformat the entire computer. Thank the techie gods for firewire external hard disks.
But now that I have Lion, I would akin my MacBook Pro stability to the very hated WindowsME! I should say here that I am being tame too! My god people, crash after crash, beach ball after beach ball, boot failure after boot failure. As I write this blog in haste, my MBP is sitting here trying to boot. Again a boot crash.
Yesterday I had the Finder beach balling, but because it now remembers what you had open, every time I rebooted, it would open the Finder in the bad state so i would just boot to a beach ball! SOOOOoooo frustrating!
Apple WHAT ARE YOU THINKING! for a company that prides itself on a rock solid OS, you have certainly failed! #FAIL lol People, Don't get Lion if you are thinking of it. Wait until the Microsoft philosophy hits apple, release for the date, add the band aids (aka patches) later. Wait until Apple releases their patches. If I find the time, I think I will go after Apple for my money back! For that money I could have gotten xPlane and had WAY more fun!
Take this warning if you take the plunge to the Lions.... What a fitting name, you will feed your stability to the Lions! DONT DO IT!
in this embedded video, this happens about every 2nd or 3rd boot of my Mac.
So the plot thickens! UPDATES!!
A few nights ago, I got home after a long day of work and wanted to cook something different. So I pull out my Macbook aiming to seek out a new recipe to try. Well to my shock when I entered my password, the login screen went away and came back. Ok, that was weird, no shaky login window that would normally happen when you enter an incorrect password. Oh well, I tried again. Zip zilch, nadda. The login screen went away and came back.
So I entered an incorrect password. This caused the login window to shake as if to say no. So clearly it recognized a valid vs. an invalid password. So now I am getting hungry and am crabby. I went to single user mode and reset passwords, created a new account and unlocked the root account. Rebooted and same thing. I could not even use the ROOT account!
So that was it. This was Friday night and I decided to crash the Apple store Saturday morning. So I show up at the Apple store closest to me at 8:30am when they open for repair and "genius" appointments.
When I got there I explained the situation to the guy at the door. The quintessential apple store robot said no. I need to make an appointment and whipped out his iPad to begin the process and proclaimed that the first available time they could see me would be 12pm. This is the point where the fire inside me has reached that critical mass from a slight annoyance to a full blown get the security guard ready because I am going to blow!
So I tried to be a civil human here, and explain the frustrations I am having and that it would be in their best interests here to give me a break as I have it within my ability to persuade many people for or against this "Lion" (as I point to the life sized Lion ad beside me). That I am also a sys admin in a company that has a large amount of Macs and it would be my call as to weather we used Lion or not.
On a side note here, reasoning with the Apple people robots is futile! He would not budge. So I said ok, that's fine, I pointed to the bench outside the store and said I will sit here until 12pm, boot my Mac in Linux which works perfectly and continue my blog about my experiences with Lion thus far. So I did. I started writing and took this video of the login behavior:
Well within 15 min of my doing this, I was approached by an Apple robot stating that they would see me in 30 min. This is very cult like! Don't you think? Does it remind you of a "church" based on science fiction book? **shrug**
So since they made an effort, I too made an effort and closed my Macbook and left the scene for a bit. When I came back I was put through the typical Apple store cult thing where they approach you, and ask you to have a seat in a magic stool of their choice where I am approached by somebody who seems to know all! Yep, a "Mac Genius!" HA HA HA HE HE HE HA HA HA
Anyway, after I explain all that has been happening:
- Failure to install
- Reformat of the Mac Partition
- Constant crashing
- Re-installation again
- now the login failure
He put my computer on their diagnostic program. At this point they see that I have upgraded their spawn's (my computer) hard drive with one that is not a APPLE BRANDED drive. At this point he goes into an infinite loop stating its the hard drive. Its the hard drive... NO ITS NOT THE HARD DRIVE. Not to toot my own horn, but I have been working with computer hardware for about 20 years now since MFM Hard drives and 5.25" floppy disks and I had way more experience than this hack they call a genius. One of the first things I did was check the hard drive. Also seeing as though I had a linux partition on the same drive and it worked perfectly, I would have put my life on the line that the hard disk was fine.
So I tried to reason with him and say look, I KNOW its not the hard drive and said that I know he knows about computers and deep down inside past the brain washing he knew it was not the hard drive either. But I understand that you are told to tell me this. What is the issue?
Because I was planning to roll this out at the office and my main reason for coming in was to understand what went wrong! and it really was. I simply wanted to know. After a while, he admitted to not knowing the issue. He also suggested that I reformat and remove the linux partitions. This was something I had already though about and was reluctant.
But after going this far, I figured ok, why not. Having little expectation that this would solve the issue, I wiped away my perfect linux installation.
My ATC Simulator, my android SDK, my perfect configuration.... gone... and I re-installed Lion. Well would it be any wonder that what I thought would happen, happened? Yep, now I have no Linux partition, and a failing Lion OS. Now I can login again, however every time I close the lid, the computer goes bonkers! Clicks don't register, and the system is laggy and completely unstable. I should not here that I also have 8 gig ram, so its not a memory issue...
What I am getting at here in a very wordy way is STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM LION! Mac used to be known for having a rock solid system and I expected the same fron Lion. Now it seems that it has plunged into the stability relhm of Windows ME! If you choose to do so, Good luck, and God Speed! Just please don't ask me for any help!
As a side note, please feel free to read Kishcom's stance on Apple. Andrew is a respected coworker of mine. http://kishcom.com/gnu-linux/what-i-dont-like-about-apple/
****UPDATE****
I think I figured out this behavior. OS/X Cannot handle "DOS Logical & Extended partition"
Those of you who know about drive partitioning, once you want to pass 4 partitions, you need a "Logical Partition" where more partitions live. This is a legacy throw back issue. OS/X barfs rotten chinks when you use this.
I am running with 3 partitions now, (OS/X, Linux Swap, Linux), and not my ideal setup as I like to have my root Linux in a traditional server partition scheme. But in any case, this seems to have solved the issue. NO LOGICAL PARTITIONS. In my humble opinion.... FAIL
