I got a white Macbook Santa Rosa a few months ago basically because I wanted to have a long-period first-hand experience using OS X on proper hardware. I’m a Linux fan and FLOSS advocate and surely Apple is a gross propietary-minded corporation and yes, I know I should be rejecting their products as the plague but I’m also a curious geek and I came to the point where I was clearly feeling I was missing 1/3 of today’s desktop action if I only used Linux and Windows. So I bought it and can’t regret it, I’ve been quite happy so far.
It’s no news Apple computers just work. When you switch, you learn your way around the new system in the first couple of weeks. Of course you don’t get to know every aspect of the OS but you get to learn all the stuff you really care about and use everyday.
So everything was really fine with Leopard until I started to notice this very rare keyboard freezes. Wait! Keyboard freezes? I guess I had never experienced something like that with Windows and Linux before unless it was a bad cable or the keyboard cord got disconnected so at the very first time the concept seemed a bit alien. I’m a geek and the most of the times I know may way around computers and even without the keyboard to perform some basic testing and diagnosis I concluded that most of the running software was doing just fine and you could continue browsing the net and doing anything else that only required the use of the mouse so this was something strange that only compromised the use of the keyboard. But having no keyboard is quite annoying! Specially for a Linux guy that has at least one terminal open under OS X in order to feel sane taking my daily dose of bash, vim, wget and a few other command line utilities I can’t live without.
I realized that the keyboard freeze got fixed when I closed the current session and started a new one. Despite the session fix finding I must admit I was worried the thing was some weird hardware issue and I was somewhat expecting it to be gone by itself because it was happing once every week or two weeks and I could handle that.
Now a couple of weeks ago this freezes started to happen more and more often and the last days almost daily. Sometimes I had too many apps opened or I was using Windows under VMware so I was really a hassle so I searched the web for a solution and quickly found the patches from Apple in the form a small 978K update that requires a bigger 110 MB update that upgrades the system to version 10.5.1.
The upgrade process requires you to reboot your Macbook twice: first after the upgrade to OS X 10.5.1 has been completed then after installing the keyboard freezes fix. I’ve been using the Mac for a while and the problem seems to be gone.
I’m posting this as a reminder to myself because I might be trying a full reinstall of the software in my laptop in a few weeks in order to get a clean triple boot system up and running and because someone else may find the post useful.
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