Apple Posts Mac OS X 10.5.2, Security Fixes

Four months after shipping Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard," Apple finally offers an update that smoothes some sharp corners on their flagship operating system.

With much fanfare—and several months of delay after shifting engineers over to its iPhone effort—Apple shipped Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard,” the latest version of its operating system for Macintosh computers. Now, four months later, the company has released Mac OS X 10.5.2, a substantial update to its “Leopard” operating system. Apple is recommending it for all users of Mac OS X 10.5 because of numerous stability enhancements and fixes, and many are categorizing 10.5.2 as the first “real” release of Leopard, smoothing some of the sharp corners that marred earlier releases and addressing a handful of the Apple faithful’s pet peeves.

Among the fixes in 10.5.2 are additional support for using Back to My Mac with third-party routers; numerous fixes for the Finder, Parental Controls, iCal, Mail, iChat, and other applications; an error in which Setup Assistant appeared at every startup; improvements to Wi-Fi networking which may improve wireless networking performance in Leopard; and a menu bar option for the integrated Time Machine backup utility. Among cosmetic fixes are an option to turn off much-loathed transparency in the Leopard menu bar, along wih a new traditional folder view for “Stacks” in the Mac OS X Dock.

Mac OS X 10.5.2 is available via Mac OS X’s built-in Software Update feature, as also as standalone combo updaters for Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server. The updates are substantial (the combo edition for Mac OS X is about 350 MB) and take a while to install; we recommend following Apple’s advice and performing a thorough backup of your system before attempting to update to Mac OS X 10.5.2.

Apple also released a security update for users of both Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” and Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard,” dealing with potential problems with Mail, Launch Services, Samba, Parental Controls, and even the Mac OS X Terminal application. The security update—Apple’s first for 2008—is also available via Software Update.