First, unstable machine  .

Then, regular crashes of the Finder and Safari.

Now, weird font bugs:

Finder menus open on the French desktop, every entry rendered as scrambled half-missing letters instead of readable words

Shutdown dialog reduced to a power icon and four completely blank buttons, all their labels gone

This madness will never stop… :(

Leopard desktop with a window replaced by a flat blue rectangle, and an alert beside it showing only a warning triangle and three empty buttons

Just found new species of bugs:

Finder menu bar with a solid black rectangle hanging below it where the open menu should be drawn

Trash window listing .THM files, its action menu rendered as a solid black block

My 6 months test period of Leopard is over. Time to switch back to a Linux/KDE desktop.

Update (May 2010)

6 months later, I’ve:

  • updated Mac OS X from Leopard to Snow Leopard,

  • upgraded Kubuntu from Karmic Koala (9.10) to Lucid Lynx (10.04),

  • changed my HDD to a SSD (a 160 Go Intel X25-M Postville).

Still, my machine crash hard. Here is the kind of kernel crashes I have on Kubuntu with this machine:

MacBook Pro screen filled with a Linux kernel oops trace in ext4 writeback, a system monitor to the left showing cores at 76 and 82 degrees

I now suspect problems with the MacBook Pro’s SATA controller. After all, my machine always freeze on high I/O load (disk backups, video transcoding, etc.). Wait. I remember of Apple pushing a new SATA firmware one year ago. Let me google this…

Bingo! This is a firmware issue ! I knew it! So I just followed these instructions this afternoon to downgrade my firmware to EFI 1.6.

I can now check that it really set SATA bandwidth back to 1.5 Gbps: 

1$ cat /var/log/dmesg | grep Gbps
2[    0.800530] ahci 0000:00:0b.0: AHCI 0001.0200 32 slots 6 ports 1.5 Gbps 0x3 impl IDE mode
3[    1.330097] ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
4[    1.330112] ata2: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
5[    2.280096] ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
6[    2.290110] ata2: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)

But the firmware downgrade didn’t solved my problems at all. It’s really time to trash this MacBook Pro. Anyone to suggest a good laptop that works fine on Kubuntu?

Update (June 2010)

For the record, here is what my MacBook looked like at boot in the end of June 2010, two days after the end of the 1-year warranty:

MacBook Pro stuck at boot on a grey screen showing only the flashing folder with a question mark

At Paris’ Genius Bar, I was told that my motherboard was dead, which cost 400€ to replace. And that’s how I finally decided to sell my MacBook Pro and get rid of all my Apple gear and proprietary software.