The World's Largest Console

The first problem arose after I had transferred over all my applications, data and settings from my Macbook. Apple includes a Migration Utility to help you move data from another Mac when you first setup a new one, and I thought I'd give this a spin and see how it worked. I chose to transfer over everything just to see what would happen. At the same time this was going on, OSX was downloading a number of OS and firmware updates to bring my machine up to date. I let both of these run to completion and then was prompted to restart my computer to apply some of the OSX updates (yes, updating a Mac sometimes requires a restart, just like Windows).

The machine restarted and I got the familiar login window, clicked on my name, entered my password and ... the screen went black. Huh? No, it wasn't completely black, there was a little text way up in the upper left corner::

Welcome to Darwin!
Login:

Somehow the OSX window manager had exited and dumped me right to the Darwin console. I tried logging in and exiting, rebooting, even typing Ctrl-D at the Login prompt to exit out of the terminal mode. Everything eventually just took me back to the graphical login window and from there, the console login prompt. Yikes!

Googling didn't reveal anything obvious so I did what any well-trained Windows user would do: I reinstalled OSX from scratch. But this time I skipped the Migration Utility, partly because I was suspicious that it may have been the culprit, and partly because I didn't really want to transfer everything over (and lastly because I'd never installed OSX from scratch and wanted to give it a try). That seemed to do the trick and the machine was now logging me into OSX correctly.

DVDead

The second problem I ran into had to do with playing a DVD. I play DVDs on my Macbook fairly often, and it works great. I wanted to see how one would look on a 24-inch display so I popped in Skin and Bones, waited for the usual whirring and humming of the DVD drive, saw QuickTime/iDVD come up and then to my surprise saw the message: Supported disc not available. After trying a few things (reinserting the DVD, using a different DVD, rebooting), I started to get a little worried.

This time, Google was my friend. I got quite a few hits about this problem and a pretty consistent suggestion as a solution: use the Disk Utility to fix the permissions. So I booted off the installation disk, ran Repair Disk Permissions (while wondering to myself, why is this necessary?) and restarted the iMac. I popped in the DVD and it worked.

Yes, the Mac is a great machine and OSX is a very nice operating system, but it does have its occasional problems. What's interesting, though, is that when I run into these issues on the Mac, I'm generally surprised. When I run into them on Windows, however, I usually just take them in stride, as if reinstalling apps, rebooting, and Googling your way out of the error tarpit is just the status quo. Using a Mac is like driving down a smooth highway and hitting the occasional bump in the road. Using Windows feels more like you are driving down a dirt road: you expect a rough ride and look forward to the occasioanal clear patches.

Tags: mac, osx