Mac OS X v10.2
Encyclopedia
Mac OS X version 10.2 "Jaguar" is the third major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

. It superseded Mac OS X v10.1
Mac OS X v10.1
Mac OS X version 10.1, code named "Puma", is the second major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system. It superseded Mac OS X v10.0 and preceded Mac OS X v10.2. Version 10.1 was released on 25 September 2001 as a 'free update' to version 10.0...

 code name Puma and preceded Mac OS X Panther (version 10.3). The operating system was initially available on 23 August 2002 either for single-computer installations, and in a "family pack", which allows five installations on separate computers in one household. The operating system was generally well-received by Macintosh users as a large step forward in the areas of stability, general speed enhancements, compatibility with other flavors of Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 and the lineup of both graphical and command line applications available; however, many critics still claimed that significant user interface speed issues existed and that the operating system was still immature and awkward to use.

Jaguar was the first Mac OS X release to publicly use its code name
Code name
A code name or cryptonym is a word or name used clandestinely to refer to another name or word. Code names are often used for military purposes, or in espionage...

 in marketing and advertisements, a practice that has continued in subsequent releases of the operating system.

System requirements

  • Supported Computers: PowerMac G3, G4, early PowerMac G5, iMac
    IMac
    The iMac is a range of all-in-one Macintosh desktop computers built by Apple. It has been the primary part of Apple's consumer desktop offerings since its introduction in 1998, and has evolved through five distinct forms....

    , eMac
    EMac
    The eMac, short for education Mac, was a Macintosh desktop computer made by Apple Inc. It was originally aimed at the education market, but was later made available as a cheaper mass market alternative to Apple's second-generation LCD display iMac....

    , PowerBook G3
    PowerBook G3
    The PowerBook G3 is a line of laptop Macintosh computers made by Apple Computer between 1997 and 2000. It was the first laptop to use the PowerPC G3 series of microprocessors...

     or G4
    PowerBook G4
    The PowerBook G4 are a series of notebook computers that were manufactured, marketed, and sold by Apple, Inc. between 2001 and 2006 as part of its PowerBook line. It uses the PowerPC G4 processor, initially produced by Motorola and later by Freescale, after Motorola spun off its semiconductor...

    , or iBook
    IBook
    The iBook was a line of laptop computers sold by Apple Computer from 1999 to 2006. The line targeted the consumer and education markets, with lower specifications and prices than the PowerBook, Apple's higher-end line of laptop computers....

     computer
  • Amount of RAM
    Ram
    -Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...

     Required:
    128 megabyte
    Megabyte
    The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...

    s (MB) (Although 256 MB to 512 MB is highly recommended by many people who have used Mac OS X v10.2.8 as the real amount of RAM
    Ram
    -Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...

     used when only the Operating System
    Operating system
    An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

     is running is around 200 MB, but it can be run with as low as 96 MB although it will not run at full speed).
  • Processor Type: PowerPC
    PowerPC
    PowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...

     G3, G4 or G5 running at 233 MHz or higher.

End-user features

Apple advertised that Mac OS X v10.2 "Jaguar" had new features, such as:
  • Address Book — A system-wide repository for contact information in the updated Address Book.
  • Rendezvous
    Bonjour (software)
    In computing, Bonjour is Apple Inc.'s trade name for its implementation of Zeroconf, a group of technologies that includes service discovery, address assignment, and name resolution...

    — Rendezvous is Apple's implementation of an IETF
    Internet Engineering Task Force
    The Internet Engineering Task Force develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite...

     open protocol (Zeroconf
    Zeroconf
    Zero configuration networking , is a set of techniques that automatically creates a usable Internet Protocol network without manual operator intervention or special configuration servers....

    ) that allows devices over a network to essentially 'find each other' with a directory listing service. For example, a Bonjour enabled printer connected to a network, could 'find' and connect to a Bonjour enabled computer without any user configuration. This technology is used today in applications like iTunes music sharing
    ITunes
    iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....

     and iChat Bonjour messaging.
  • CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), the modular printing system for Unix-like
    Unix-like
    A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....

     operating systems.
  • Finder
    Macintosh Finder
    The Finder is the default file manager used on Mac OS and Mac OS X operating systems; it is responsible for the overall user-management of files, disks, network volumes and the launching of other applications...

    — A revamped Finder with searching built directly into every window.
  • Mail — A mail client with an adaptive spam mail filter.
  • Network support for Microsoft Windows
    Microsoft Windows
    Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

     networks
    — Increased support for networks in Jaguar. Apple added much more support for Microsoft Windows networks, and Microsoft Windows sharing protocols. Most of the changes were added behind the scenes, which included new Samba tools, and new printing protocols.
  • Quartz Extreme
    Quartz Compositor
    Quartz Compositor is the windowing system in Mac OS X. It is responsible for presenting and maintaining rasterized, rendered graphics from the rest of the Core Graphics framework and other renderers in the Quartz technologies family...

    — Quartz Extreme was added for compositing graphics directly on the video card, without the use of software to composite windows. The technology allotted the task of drawing the 3D surface of windows to the generally idle graphics processing unit
    Graphics processing unit
    A graphics processing unit or GPU is a specialized circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory in such a way so as to accelerate the building of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display...

    , rather than to the central processing unit
    Central processing unit
    The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...

    . Overall, the technology benefited the areas of user interface responsiveness and general speed enhancements throughout.
  • Sherlock 3Web service
    Web service
    A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...

    s.
  • Universal Access — Dozens of new features here.
  • Increased speed across the entire system.
  • Journaled file system (first introduced in 10.2.3 Server, later made available to 10.2.x clients).

New application in Jaguar

  • Inkwell
    Inkwell (Macintosh)
    Inkwell, or simply Ink, is the name of the handwriting recognition technology developed by Apple Inc. and built into the Mac OS X operating system. Introduced in an update to Mac OS X v10.2 "Jaguar", Inkwell can translate English, French, and German writing...

    , for handwriting recognition
    Handwriting recognition
    Handwriting recognition is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input from sources such as paper documents, photographs, touch-screens and other devices. The image of the written text may be sensed "off line" from a piece of paper by optical scanning or...

    .

Marketing

In October 2002, Apple offered free copies of Jaguar to all U.S K-12 teachers in the "X For Teachers" program. Teachers who wanted a copy simply had to fill out a form and a packet containing Mac OS X discs and manuals was shipped to the school that they worked at.

Jaguar marked the first Mac OS X release which publicly used its code name as both a marketing ploy and as an official reference to the operating system. To that effect, Apple replaced their standard Mac OS X box with a new Jaguar-themed box.

Mac OS X v10.2 was never officially referred to as Jaguar in the United Kingdom due to an agreement with the car manufacturer Jaguar
Jaguar (car)
Jaguar Cars Ltd, known simply as Jaguar , is a British luxury car manufacturer, headquartered in Whitley, Coventry, England. It is part of the Jaguar Land Rover business, a subsidiary of the Indian company Tata Motors....

, although boxes and CDs still bore the Jaguar-fur logo.

Today, all Mac OS X releases are given a feline
Felidae
Felidae is the biological family of the cats; a member of this family is called a felid. Felids are the strictest carnivores of the thirteen terrestrial families in the order Carnivora, although the three families of marine mammals comprising the superfamily pinnipedia are as carnivorous as the...

-related name upon announcement, and Mac OS X releases are now referred to by their code name, in addition to version numbers.

Release history

Version Build Date OS name
Uname
uname is a software program in Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems that prints the name, version and other details about the current machine and the operating system running on it...

Notes
10.2 6C115, 6C115a August 24, 2002 Darwin
Darwin (operating system)
Darwin is an open source POSIX-compliant computer operating system released by Apple Inc. in 2000. It is composed of code developed by Apple, as well as code derived from NeXTSTEP, BSD, and other free software projects....

 6.0
Original retail release
10.2.1 6D52 September 18, 2002 Darwin 6.1 About the Mac OS X 10.2.1 Update, codename Jaguar Red
10.2.2 6F21 November 11, 2002 Darwin 6.2 About the Mac OS X 10.2.2 Update, codename Jaguar Blue or Merlot
10.2.3 6G30 December 19, 2002 Darwin 6.3 About the Mac OS X 10.2.3 Update, codename Jaguar Green
6G37 Updated retail release
6G50 Server edition; retail release
10.2.4 6I32 February 13, 2003 Darwin 6.4 About the Mac OS X 10.2.4 Update, codename Jaguar Pink
10.2.5 6L29 April 10, 2003 Darwin 6.5 About the Mac OS X 10.2.5 Update, codename Jaguar Plaid
10.2.6 6L60 May 6, 2003 Darwin 6.6 About the Mac OS X 10.2.6 Update, codename Jaguar Black
10.2.7 6R65 September 22, 2003 Darwin 6.7 Removed from distribution due to defects
10.2.8 6R73 October 3, 2003 Darwin 6.8 About the Mac OS X 10.2.8 Update; released as 6R50 for one day
6S90 About the Mac OS X 10.2.8 (G5) Update


Mac OS X v10.2.7 (codenames Blackrider, Smeagol) was only available to the new Power Mac G5s and aluminum PowerBook G4s released before Mac OS X Panther. Officially, it was never released to the general public.

Mac OS X v10.2.8 is the last version of Mac OS X officially supported on the "beige G3" desktop and minitower systems, as well as the PowerBook G3
PowerBook G3
The PowerBook G3 is a line of laptop Macintosh computers made by Apple Computer between 1997 and 2000. It was the first laptop to use the PowerPC G3 series of microprocessors...

 Series (1998) also known as Wallstreet/PDQ; though later releases can be run on such Macs with the help of unofficial, unlicensed, and unsupported third-party tools such as XPostFacto
XPostFacto
XPostFacto is an open source utility that enables the installation of PowerPC versions of Mac OS X up to Mac OS 10.4 , and Darwin on some PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh systems that are not officially supported for them by Apple....

.

Also, the famous Happy Mac that had greeted Mac users for almost 18 years during the Macintosh startup sequence was replaced with a large grey Apple logo with the introduction of Mac OS X 10.2.

External links

  • Mac OS X v10.2 review at Ars Technica
    Ars Technica
    Ars Technica is a technology news and information website created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, science, technology policy, and video games. Ars Technica is known for its features, long articles that go...

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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