I installed Mac OS X 10.3 “Panther” on my iMac yesterday, after a false start. I prefer to do a virgin reformat and reinstall rather than use the upgrade options, and I made a backup on my WiebeTech Fire800 external hard drive. When that turned out to be thrashed, I thought the installer had reformatted both drives. It turns out there is an incompatibility between Panther and Firewire drives using the Oxford 922 chipset, firmware revision 1.0.2, at least when connecting a Firewire 400 Mac to a Firewire 800 drive. After upgrading the firmware to 1.0.5, everything is back to normal. Fortunately I have off-site backups for most of my files. Normally, I would have a second backup on a drive that I specifically selected because it uses a different Firewire bridge, the Indigita-powered EZQuest Cobra+, but as Murphy would have it, it was back at the manufacturer for replacement after the hard drive in it started failing. Never assume anything…

An interesting thing is there are some changes to the Panther BSD core that are clearly designed to make it more familiar for Linux users, at the risk of breaking things for previous OS X users. The default shell is now bash rather than tcsh. Some userland utilities like tar are now the GNU rather than BSD version. Terminal.app sets the environment variable TERM to xterm-color (it used to be vt100), another Linux idiom. vi has been replaced by vim, a close, but not strictly identical substitute.

Since I burned out of the Linux constant upgrade treadmill in 1993 (after having had to recompile gcc and the kernel three times in a week just to install applications), I appreciate system stability like the one provided by Solaris, and have very mixed feelings about these changes.