Panther - First Impressions
First impressions of Panther are very good. Installation was pretty painless. If you’re upgrading it’s probably best to go down the customised install route, disabling all the additional languages and printer drivers. Doing this will save yourself around half a Gb in space and speeds up the install no end. There’s various other customise options, though it’s interesting to note that declining to install Internet Explorer also removes the Verdana and Georgia fonts from your system. Todd Dominey has more on the subject.
Once it’s all up and running, one of the first things you’ll probably do is open loads of windows and try out the ExposÈ feature. I have to say it’s a highly impressive piece of engineering - very easy to use and immaculately implemented. After a while grinning and repetitively zooming windows in and out, you’ll probably want to memorise the function keys, then enable fast user switching.
This is the other 'ooh' part of Panther. You can fully expect this to be demo-ed to death by computer salesmen up and down the land. Like ExposÈ, it’s a great feature and the first couple of times you use it you can’t help but grin inanely.
Other noticeable changes - the new Finder windows are taking a bit of getting used to. It think it’s the brushed metal look that is throwing me a bit. Somehow they don’t look right. Maybe they’ll take time to get used to, but the new format is a big improvement. The context-sensitive 'action' button (the one with cog icon) is proving to be highly useful too.
All in all installation was a breeze, the only slight issues were losing my custom PHP and MySQL installation and CandyBar icons, but I half expected this to happen. There’s obviously a bucket load of new stuff I haven’t covered yet, but first impressions are dead good ;-)
Posted 6 years, 4 months ago on 29th October 2003.
Comments
Managed to get MySQL back, though I haven’t found out how to re-enable PHP yet... Very happy though. Just discovered the threaded feature in Mail.app - very useful!
Phil · 6 years, 4 months ago
Want me to e-mail you my httpd.conf file? PHP is working for me now. ;)
Tommy · 6 years, 4 months ago
panther was a no problem install for me as well. Key seems to be to check permissions (repair if needed) and run disk utility to check for bad drive/sectors.
PHP is working, kind of. Can’t pass variables in URLs though. Doh! :|
Tommy · 6 years, 4 months ago
Tommy,
Sounds like you might need to change the php.ini file to turn on register_globals. Are you referencing variables in URLs like $_GET['var'] or like $var?
I’m still without PHP - if you can email your httpd.conf file that be cool ;-)
Phil · 6 years, 4 months ago
Yay, I got it working thanks to your advice. I’m a total newbie to Apache and PHP, hence my lack of clue to edit the php.ini file. :D
By the way, here’s my httpd.conf file: http://www.reiter.plus.com/httpd.conf.zip
Tommy · 6 years, 4 months ago
Cheers Tommy. For the record, it looks like the only lines that need to be changed in httpd.conf are -
line 239
LoadModule php4_module libexec/httpd/libphp4.so
and line 282
AddModule mod_php4.c
Phil · 6 years, 4 months ago
i’m having the same problem where my variables aren’t being passed from one page to another – haven’t been able to find any help in this regard.
php is working, but variables don’t pass.
any help would be appreciated!
spunky · 6 years, 3 months ago
Sounds like you have the register_globals feature switched off. If it’s switched off you need to reference variables being passed to the page properly (i.e. $_GET['variablename'], $_POST['variablename'], $_SESSION['variablename'] etc.)
More info here -
http://www.php.net/manual/en/security.registerglobals.php
Alternatively, you could edit your php.ini file to turn on register_globals (though I’d recommended writing scripts with it off).
More info here -
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031104115822608
Phil · 6 years, 3 months ago
Got Panther running on both of my PowerMacs (466MHz Graphite and dual 1.25GHz MDD) so far no problems, only tasty Apple goodness. :)
I used to hate brushed metal, but now I like it.
Still got a lot of software to install and PHP to get running, but that should be easy. ;)
Tommy · 6 years, 4 months ago