Last night, I attempted the long-delayed upgrade of the operating
system on my trusty Apple G4 Cube (well, perhaps “trusty” is a bit
of an exaggeration) from Mac OS X 10.2 (“Jaguar”) to 10.3
(“Panther”). And it seemed to go well, too.
Until it didn't, that is. After an uneventful installation, I
rebooted and awaited my familiar desktop. And it came up–and then
went away. And then came up. And went away.
For those of you conversant with Mac-ese, the Finder was crashing on
load, and restarting itself over and over (and over). While I could
get to anything that was on the happy bouncy Toolbar, I was pretty
much hosed as far as getting to any of my files.
I dialed up Apple Customer Care. While on hold, I went into the
system preferences panel and set up a new user, to see if this was
just
a problem with my default account or if it was global. Mac OS X,

for those of you not following along in the technology trade rags, is

a multiuser operating system based on the BSD flavor of Unix. All this

nice and fuzzy stuff that most Apple users are content to play with on

a daily basis is just a silk dress on an Abrhams main battle tank. As

a grepper from way back, I was prepared to muck around from the
command line if I had to.
By the time I got to the head of the queue and actually got to speak
with a live support person, I had already established that, yes, it
was just a problem with my primary account. Apparently, something in
my preferences had bolloxed up Finder, and everything behaved fine
from another account. I turned the new account into an administrative

account, and was ready to go reset some bits.
But apparently, that isn't where the tech support guy wanted me to
go. He wanted me to reboot from the installation CD. And the Cube
didn't want to do that. After about a half-hour of attempting to boot

from CD, the support guy said, “Did you put any additional RAM into
this system?”
Yes, I had. “Well, we need to pull it out,” he said. “The RAM is

conflicting with the CD boot.”
It was around this point that he suggested that he could solve my
problem with a brand new G5. I graciously declined.
As we grew closer to the precipice of popping the Cube open, I started

to think we were going very far afield from what was a relatively
simple software configuration problem. Fortunately, my wife was at my

shoulder making noises about dinner–she was going out, and I needed
to feed the kids–so I had an excuse to bail on the scripted
sado-masochism session I suddenly found myself in and get an incident

number so that I could return, if I so wished, for more pain at a
later date.

A few hours later, (kids, don't try this at home) I went back, booted

from disk into my new account, and using the awsome powers of root
access, chown and chmod, regained access to my old files

and moved them into my new account. Then I deleted the old account.
After running chown -R * on a few directories, all of my problems were

history.

Needless to say, I have not called Apple back. Maybe someone should
introduce the Customer Care folks to “Unix for Dummies” or
something. [the dot-communist]