Faced with numerous reports about Mac OS X 10.1 build 5f24 (Macworld Preview), and thinly veiled pointers to their availability on the 'net, I succumbed and downloaded a 618.9 MB disk image.

This is a very early build of software not due to be released until September 2001, three months down the road. It's both ridiculous and unfair to the folks at Apple to evaluate this against shipping software, or even to released alpha- or beta-level software. This was a build put together for the Macworld Exposition / New York, held in July 2001. (It may also have been seeded to developers.) Complaining about what doesn't work, what doesn't look right, and what doesn't please is unfair and unproductive - since Apple hasn't committed to this feature set - and just muddies the waters with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. If one is to install pirated software, and operating systems in particular, it ought to be for a taste of what's improved, what's changed for the better, and what looks good. Evaluation and critique can wait until a final build, or at least a build much closer to the (promised) release date.

It's foolhardy at best, and certifiably insane at worst, to install this into an unexpecting environment. Parts may be critically unstable, APIs may have changed, and it may not have gone through any quality assurance testing. Untested, unreleased, unready software may cause you to lose all the data on your hard drive without warning. (I know you have a complete backup ready for an eventuality such as this.) Because my parents didn't raise me to be a ninny, I keep this sort of thing far, far away from my production PowerBook (on which I today run Mac OS X 10.0.4). I'm developing a Java / Java Server Pages server-side application and I don't want to disturb my delicate balance of Apache, Tomcat, and MySQL.

My production PowerBook is the G3 Pismo (FireWire) with 512 MB RAM. When I upgraded to this one I kept the last one, a G3 Lombard (Bronze) PowerBook with 384 MB RAM, which is currently unused and has the 256 MB RAM module removed for diagnostic purposes.

It is this spare machine into which I insert a Ratoc FireWire PCMCIA (PC Card), attached to which is a Que! 8x CD burner. The first time I burn a CD at 8x, but the installer complains about not being able to read parts of the packages. The second time I burn a CD at 4x, which makes for a much better installation experience :-) [This was also true of my experiences with backup copies of the Mac OS X Public Beta, from which I had to restore when travelling.]

The first thing to notice, and something I've not seen reported anywhere, is that the About this Mac dialog box reports different things depending upon whether you're in the Finder, where it says "Build 5F24", or in an application, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.1, which results in "10.1 (Macword Preview)" being shown. Interesting.

The second thing to notice is that the operating system comes up (and performs acceptably) in 64 MB RAM.

Oh, and my Lombard doesn't wake up from Sleep :-|

I'm in the middle of coding against a deadline for one of my clients and so I can't install 5F24 onto my main laptop to see how it will fare with the daily pounding, switching between networks, and the occasional use of older applications running under the Classic umbrella. (I've been offered a pirated copy of Mac OS 9.2, but I haven't yet accepted. Too busy. Soon.)

Anyway, with the caveats about mucking with pre-release software (noted above) in mind, I'm very happy with what I see. And of course I have daily backups of my entire system, should everything descend into a swirling maelstrom of undifferentiated bits.