Panther Installer: Can’t it tell what kind of screen a laptop uses?

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
December 16th, 2003 • 6:57 am

It boggles the mind. I’ve just installed Panther on my PowerBook G4 and, by default, the “Font smoothing style” in the Appearance pane in System Preferences is set to… “Standard – best for CRT”.

Surely Panther is able to tell that I’m installing it on a PowerBook and that the display is a flat panel. No?

This is way up there with the Canadian French version of Jaguar defaulting the page size to A4. (Don’t know if they have finally fixed this in Panther. Haven’t had a chance to install a French-Canadian copy of it yet.)


2 Responses to “Panther Installer: Can’t it tell what kind of screen a laptop uses?”

  1. ssp says:

    My bet is they didn’t get the A4 right. At least they didn’t for the German version which is several extra thousand miles away from any place that might want to use Letter size paper.

    I filed a bug on this ages ago. But Apple seem to pretend this problem doesn’t exist – despite it being trivial to track down.

    Regarding the font smoothing. Definitely the computer can do enough introspection to know that it’s a Powerbook. My only guesses here would be lazyness or a ‘safe’ way of doing things just in case people only run their Powerbook with an external screen attached. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to set this separately for each screen.

  2. Paul Ingraham says:

    When I installed Panther on my iBook 300, I was surprised at how well the OS seemed to know where it was installed (although I think it also was set to smooth fonts for a CRT). I’ll keep my comment brief, though, because I don’t recall any details… just a general impression that it got everything important right, and that was rather nice. :-)

Leave a Reply

Comments are closed.