Apple sprouts new seed of Mac OS X 10.4.9

The latest is just the second build of the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger operating system update to make its way outside the company's walls since build 8P2111 was released to developers in late December.

According to people familiar with the new seeding, the build is labeled Mac OS X 10.4.9 build 8P2117 and weighs in at 176.2 MB and 82 MB for Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs, respectively.

Since build 8P2111, which included numerous fixes for wireless and sync technologies, Apple has reportedly shifted the focus of Mac OS X 10.4.9 to some lower-level technology improvements.

With the latest seed, Apple has reportedly asked that developers focus their testing efforts on Activity Monitor, bash, bind, iCal, OpenSSH, Rosetta and sudo, in addition to those system components listed in the December seeding.

Those familiar with the new seed say it includes nearly two dozen bug fixes over build 8P2111, the majority of which focus on underlying system technologies such as CoreData, CUPS, CFNetwork, Kerberos, Open SSH, SMB File Server, IOkit kernel, Unix commands and WebCore.

Some of the more notable fixes target issues that may arise in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger when, connecting a system to display while in Sleep mode, the .m4v file extension is not recognized, synching data to Address Book with Sync Services, and printing with SMB home directory from Rosetta applications.

Mac OS X 10.4.9 will also reportedly address glitches that have turned up within file systems when users copy read-only files.