Running with Panther…

I’ve been running Panther without seeing the problems others have, especially when it comes to external Firewire hard disks. I have Jaguar mounted on a Firewire drive and have been using it when I needed to use my CD labeling software.

Even when I’m booted up the external hard drive, I can access the other hard drives in the machine. I can actually access the Applications folder under Panther. For grins, I tried to see if I could launch Photoshop. It did try to launch, but didn’t make it. I also tried to access my Users folder and subfolder on the Panther hard disk and found myself locked out. Nice security. To be able to get files I want from the other hard disk, I found I needed to move them to the Shared folder.

Earlier in this blog, I mentioned I wasn’t crazy about the silver and metallic coloring applied in Panther. I learned of a little utility called “Whiteout” that changed a resource file and would restore an Aqua interface to the Finder and a few other applications like iChat, Safari, and iCal. While I did like what it did to Finder, the utility didn’t affect the silver on the title bar on most applications and also turned the nice blue Apple (on the Apple menu) into a black one. In the end, the black Apple bothered me more than the original Panther coloring. Whiteout also includes an uninstaller. I’ve used it several times to install and uninstall the program.

That’s not to say that running Panther has been trouble free. I’ve seen a few iMovie crashes in Panther, but I don ‘t have enough info to decide whether it’s due to the application or the OS. I suspect the latter, though, because I’m seeing spurious crashes of several applications and the initial explanation in the debug box is the same, i.e., some kind of exception error; and those crashes have been on two separate machines.