Apple readying release of Mac OS X 10.3.2 Update

On Tuesday Apple seeded its Mac OS X developers with a pre-release version of Mac OS X 10.3.2. The software carries the build number 7D12 and weighs in just shy of 20MB, developers said. The release requires 62MB of hard disk space and is to be installed on machines running Mac OS X v10.3.1 Build 7C107.

Mac OS X 10.3.2 will provide the first significant component updates to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, and surfaces only a week after the company deployed an emergency service release to squash file system bugs in the initial release of the OS.

The new version will include updates to USB, Graphics drivers, networking, AFP Server, WebDAV and International text, Apple reportedly told testers in the release notes accompanying the build. More specifically, the update patches Panthers Font Book, Terminal, Apple File Server, Help Viewer, Language Chooser, and System UI Server applications.

Version 10.3.2 also includes significant changes to Panther's audio, display, and graphics components — including updates to several ATI Radeon, ATI Rage and nVidia GeForce graphics drivers. In addition, the release will patch a number of system frameworks, developers tell AppleInsider, including Admin, AppKit, Application Services, Carbon, CoreServices, Bluetooth, DiskImages, Java Virtual Machine, MediaKit, vecLib and WebKit.

Meanwhile, the computer maker is reportedly working on pieces of a major upgrade to Mac OS X Panther, which is said to be released as Mac OS X 10.3.5 sometime in the future. Significant component updates and minor interface enhancements have been rumored for this 'larger' Panther OS update.