MacBook Pro - Widget problem
Wednesday, August 16th, 2006
Those of you who are about to make the move to a new Macintosh using an Intel processor may want to take note of this. Those of you who have already made the move may also want to check this out.
I had a 15″ G4 PowerBook with the latest version of OS X installed. I bought a 15″ MacBook Pro and used migration assistant to move my user folder and more to the new machine from the old. The process went without a hitch, or so I thought.
Later, when using Dashboard I noticed that a few of my standard Apple Widgets didn’t work: they came up with odd icons in place of the fields where I might enter information.
In trying to fix this problem I learned that you can’t just drag Widgets in and out of your library directory, they must be installed using their own installers.
I also learned that there is a way to extract just pieces (single packages) of an Apple OS X installed CD or DVD.
In searching for a solution to this problem I came across this discussion in the Apple support forums:
“Kappy” recommended a shareware product called Pacifist.
I found, downloaded and ran Pacifist, inserted both DVDs that came with my MacBook Pro until it built a complete directory of all of the included packages, dug around for the Widgets package and installed it on my desktop.
I then quit Pacifist and (re) installed the problem Widgets. They all now work perfectly.
This problem probably may have nothing to do with the PowerPC-Intel switch; maybe more to do with a problem in Migration Assistant. Whatever it is, I seem to have solved it, thanks to Pacifist.
Hi Richard,
Hope all is well. I haven’t heard about that before, strange. I didn’t migrate anything though - just used iSync and got all my settiings etc that way.
Cheers!
Jon
Jon, I’m not absolutely sure what happened but because the intel version of OS X.4.7 is slightly different from the PPC version there may have been confusion and breaking in the migration.
Remember, in iSync you’ve already established a user on the new machine. The great thing about using migration assistant during the initial machine setup is that it simply establishes and moves the same user(s) and all of their files. I’ve done this during initial setup on my last two machines and it’s wroked flawlessly. I give Apple a huge amount of credit for making this process simple and stable. Please don’t take this post as a snipe at the process, just a way out of a possible glitch.
Thanks for your post.