Dancing Cactus Mexico Message Board

[Sandy Beach in Toronto]

Calls Mac OS X 10.4 'hindrance' to development; Apple's already dumped Tiger

Baring any last-minute change of mind, Mozilla will permanently drop support for Mac OS X 10.4 from future editions of Firefox.

Mozilla stopped supporting Mac OS X 10.4, aka Tiger, in September 2009, but left a large amount of Tiger bits in the development code. Now, said Josh Aas, a platform engineer for Mozilla who works on Mac OS X integration, it's time to either restore support for the five-year-old operating system or remove the code from the development tree.

"We would like to take advantage of more modern technologies on Mac OS X and 10.4 support has been a hindrance," said Aas in a message yesterday on the mozilla.dev.planning forum. "Where we can work around supporting 10.4, doing so consumes valuable time and effort. Neither Chrome nor Safari has to deal with this."

According to Mozilla's metrics, 24% of those running the Mac version of Firefox 3.5 rely on Tiger, while 12% of those running the just-released Firefox 3.6 do. Half of all users run Firefox 3.5 on Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, while 59% run Firefox 3.6 on OS X 10.6, or Snow Leopard.

Aas noted that Tiger users can continue to run Firefox 3.6, which supports the older operating system, until that version is retired from support.

More in http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9152920/Mozilla_ends_Firefox_support_for_Mac_OS_Tiger?taxonomyId=89

[MizTortuga]

Well, I would be mourning this development (or is that non-development) except that my 6 year old Mac iBook upgraded to Tiger died dead as the proverbial doornail the day before we left for the airport. So for the foreseeable future I won't have a Mac. Maybe someday when my refurbished cobbled together desktop Dell fails I might have to scrape together funds and get a new desktop Mac.
On our way to the airport, I picked up a Eee PC by Asus at a Best Buy. I really like the netbook tiny size for traveling. So easy to stash in any carry on, does not need a separate traveling case. I wouldn't want to deal with this small a screen at home on a long term basis, but you could plug it into a larger monitor. At some point I will probably wipe Windows off it completely and have only some Linux version. Won't be used enough at home to be spending time daily keeping security updates current.

[Sandy Beach in Toronto]

in their HD & RAM capacities for size & price! Due to size, they are somewhat lacking in larger functionalities in general like attaching printers etc. But with huge USB thumb drives cheaply available & printers that'll print right off the USB, there are ways around the limited connect ability issues (assuming unlimited funds to play with...Who? What? Where?!!).

I actually have a 20 in. LCD monitor attached to the HP Laptop since the Intel Graphics offer a "cloned monitor"/ dual desktop setting. Mostly cause I don't want to play Sherlock w/ a magnifying glass (or always side scroll w/ a lower resolution/larger text).

For frequent travelers, the net books are almost ideal! I still like a nice desktop machine for my main unit for ease of repair & upgrading (these old hands & eyes aren't much up to tweezers & jewelers screwdrivers these days).

In passing, I've this week , just bought a factory refurbished HP mini-tower (P4, 160G HD & 2 Gigs of RAM, $175) that I'm putting my favoured old XP Pro SP1 on. The HD & power supply & RAM & CDRW/DVDROM are all new components so barring the motherboard expiring it should be good & fast for several more years.

Since XP (b-4 service packs) doesn't know what a SATA drive HD is, I've had quite some fun creating a bootable OS CD w/ Sp1 slipstreamed into it
so it can find the SATA hard drive to install on! A week ago I knew almost nothing about slipstreaming, now I've made one myself!
Strangely the tech service man at Canada Computers didn't even know what one was let alone how to make one! Sad! I plan to deploy
tomorrow when I've I caught up on the lost sleep from investigating it. S

[MizTortuga]

Good luck with your new set up, Sandy! Isn't it amazing what you can teach yourself to do with a little study, concentration, imagination and perseverance. Let us know how it all turned out.

Luckily, I already have my printer on the home wireless network, so should not have a problem printing from the net book. The major pain I can see is if I need to run a cd to reinstall something I'll have to find an external drive somewhere. But seems like most programs are available as downloads these days.

Still debating as to take it to a very well thought of reputable computer repair man in La Penita to wipe the WinXP and load current Ubuntu version before we leave Mexico. In an email, he said he'll do it for $300 pesos, which is like $25 US. At home they will charge me about $100. Would be well worth the small charge to have it done right since if I screw up at home I may wish I had the external drive for the original restore cd's that came with it. He actually recommended Fedora as better than Ubuntu, but not sure I am enough techie to start from scratch on that one. Will have to do more research I guess, but time is running out, we'll be on our way home by this time next week.

[Sandy Beach in Toronto]

transfer to a big enough Flash Thumb drive & run install from there. Very
few programs will fill a multi-Gb flash available for under $20.

Once mine is up & running, I have an old WIN98 40 Gb HD I might put Ubuntu to and run as a "dual boot" set up. Fingers crossed!
Be careful ALL the installs & sub files are in English during your Mexican
tech race. The price certainly seems good!!