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13 November 2007

(More) Leopard Boot Up and Shut Down

I just realized what makes Leopard startup seem so fast. Leopard eliminated the "Starting Mac OS X" screen. It goes straight from the gray apple logo to the login window. Cool, huh.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

About the Leopard startup screen...

The progress bar startup screen was real up to and including 10.3 - it checked the booting progess and updated accordingly.

In 10.4 it was replaced by an animated fake. Apple figured that checking the booting progress was a waste of time as startup in 10.4 was faster than earlier versions. They put in the fake version to act as a filler between the grey screen and the login screen as the grey screen would still have been there a little too long.

You can launch the fake progress bar just for fun in 10.4 by typing this into Terminal:

/usr/libexec/WaitingForLoginWindow

(You'll need to quit the WaitingForLoginWindow process in Activity Monitor or just reboot afterwards to get rid of it, but it's completely harmless.)

With 10.5, booting is even quicker so Apple dropped the fake screen.

Thanks to an excellent AFP548.com article about launchd for this info:
http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=20050620071558293

RC Howe said...

Hmm, I did not know that. Thanks for the info!

Anonymous said...

Sorry but that comment is incorrect,

Apple changed the login progress window from a real one to a fake one for one reason only, the real one reported on what task was being done under the progress bar and users couldn't understand it - or even panicked when they saw things like "starting web server", so apple replaced it with the fake.

The first time the fake one runs, it records how long it was displayed for, and adjusts the timing for the next run accordingly.

It was lame so Apple removed it for 10.5