Mac Book Pro, Mac OS X 10.5.7 crashes and Ubuntu 9.04

UPDATE: After a little bit of research, I found this:

http://www.pjentrepreneur.com/2009/01/21/update-mac-book-pro-blank-screen-problem/

I've had a Mac Book Pro air laptop since June 2007, one of the 3,1 model.

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro3,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.2 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 800 MHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP31.0070.B07
SMC Version (system): 1.16f11
Serial Number (system): W8722D1NX91
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State: Enabled

My experience with it has been relatively good and I've been happy with an OS that straddles ease of use with the power of Unix under the hood. I spend hours every day at the computer (probably around 3000 hours on this one since I've bought it) so it is important that it works and although I love figuring out stuff at work I want my computer at home to help me relax.

Since the update to Mac OS X 10.5.7, my computer has been acting up in weird ways. Of course, I'm all out of luck since I did not renew my warranty. I'm not the only one as Min Lin had to change her hard drive for another one when the SMART monitoring started indicating imminent failures. Luckily that was pretty cheap to do in Taiwan.

I've always had display problems of some kind in previous releases. I have a dual-monitor setup (MBP 15 inch display with a Dell 2405FPW 24 inch display) and sometimes one of the display would start flickering for a while, or one of the display would not come back from sleep (with Detect displays resolving that issue) or...

But with the latest update, this went from annoying to disastrous. The OS' WindowServer (equivalent to Xserver) will completely freeze (not even a killall -HUP WindowServer from an ssh shell will recover it) with very abstract artwork being displayed. Using Skype now is a guaranteed crash.

I call this one "windows in the snow"

What is more annoying is that at reboot the boot up process will eventually crash indicating that you need to reboot once again (and again, and again...). The only way to recover from this one seemed to be to boot in single user (Cmd-S at boot) and run a fsck -fy that would ALWAYS find that /var/run/pcscd.pub (incorrect block count for the file pcscd.pub (should be 16 instead of 17). "pcscd is the Unix daemon that handles smartcards for OS X so this appears to be due to some built-in problem in the OS where that particular process file is always open.

I've been researching these issues, but opposite to certainly Linux and sometimes Windows, Mac OS X users are proud of being able to be generally ignorant of anything "technical" and so when confronted with an actual problem they are less than helpful at describing bugs and resolving them instead of just blindly trying things. Apple's help is similarly suited to users that don't know much so you are pretty much stuck figuring the issue yourself. Not only that, but I've read in some places that Apple was aware and may be working at solving these issues but they haven't and will not say anything publically.

From what I gleaned, all this seems to be due to a long present issue with the NVidia GeForce 8600M GT and similar video cards - an actual firmware bug that from release to release gets worked around differently. So under that nice aluminium casing there is actually a lemon! Of course, they probably have/had code to work around the issue which explains the generally satisfying experience but as the OS code evolves so do regressions appear making using Mac OS X on this defective hardware unsustainable in the long term. Which is really sad because when you invest 2K$ in a computer you expect it to last for more than 2 years... Any other company would see itself a subject of a class action suit, but of course fans of Apple are generally more fanatic and can afford to swap a lemon after a while....

So just for kick, I've downloaded Linux Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (Jalopy!) 9.04 LiveCD. Surprisingly, this boots and works straight up from the CD-ROM. Surprising since the last time I looked into it you had to jump through all kind of hoops to get it to run on the special EFI architecture that the MacBook have.

Ubuntu has its own problems of course and some of those issues that have been known for a long time (such as the inability to drive the Dell 2405FPW higher than 1280x1024 when it is a 1920x1200 display), the very jumpy touchpad that I had to disable or other subtle user interface bugs (such as an invisible force field that prevents dragging windows from one display to the other). These of course will just get ignored if I report them as they are always working on the next generation instead - most of my bugs related to Linux distros have been closed in the past as deprecated in new releases even when they are very easy to reproduce.

But at least I get hope that it is possible to run this hardware without crashing all the times. It also seems to strangely help with resetting whatever issue is occuring on the Mac OS X side...