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More about the Leopard 10.5.1 updater: try installing the larger version

I didn't even realize there were two versions!

CNET staff
2 min read

There are users who are still having troubles with Repair Permissions after applying the 10.5.1 Leopard update. One reader writes:

Unable to repair permissions in 10.5 or 10.5.1. Disk Utility permission repair hangs and then I have excessive fan activity.

And another:

Hi, I've updated Leopard to 10.5.1 on my powermac G5 1.6GHz (on top of an original erase and install). My Disk Utility's repair permissions function shows less than 1 minute remaining, although it stays like that for a while... I waited around 15 minutes before stopping the process. I ran top in the terminal application and noticed that repairing permissions started a process "installdb" which was using 65-75% of my CPU. More troubling was that this process remained hogging CPU cycles even after I aborted permissions repair.

And, as I mentioned earlier, there are all these SUID file warnings that I get when I repair permissions after the update.

I did a little research but couldn't learn anything very useful about installdb. It appears to have the job of examining the receipts database when you start a permissions repair. That is presumably the file inside /Library/Receipts/db (Leopard uses little databases in a lot of places where previous versions of the system used cache files), but why some users are having trouble accessing it, or how one is supposed to rebuild it or repair it if it has problems, remains unclear.

Meanwhile, I got a note from reader Adam pointing out something about the 10.5.1 update that I had completely failed to observe: there are two versions of the updater, the one that you get through Software Updater and the one you get by downloading from the download Web page. The former is considerably smaller than the second, and has the word "Patch" in its name (which you can see if you ask Software Updater to download the file without performing the installation). I think the reason I didn't notice this is that I didn't expect such a difference to exist. When you've already updated the system, a later updater comes in two flavors, the smaller "delta" updater and the larger "combo" updater; but since this is the first update to Leopard, I didn't suppose there would be such a distinction. So, even though MacFixIt generally recommends the combo updaters over the smaller "delta" updaters, I didn't realize that there was another distinction to draw. The smaller updater, as Adam points out, patches the target files, replacing selected bits of their innards; the full updater contains the entire target files and just replaces them wholesale.

So I downloaded and installed the second, larger one. Then I ran Repair Permissions - and those SUID file warnings were gone. (Except for the one about ARDagent; I can see I'm just going to have to live with that one.) So perhaps doing what I did - downloading the full updater and installing that - will help others as well.

Resources

  • SUID file warnings
  • download Web page
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