Tiger awaiting final update before Leopard

According to reports, Apple has provided its developer community with new pre-release builds of its upcoming Mac OS X 10.4.11 Update. It is widely expected to be the last improvement to the current Tiger operating system before Leopard ships (in the US) in October.

The new builds - dubbed Mac OS X 10.4.11 build 8S2151 (for Intel Macs) and Mac OS X 10.4.11 build 8S151 (for PowerPC Macs) - aim to fix familiar issues and especially those relating to system hangs when unmounting NFS volumes and copying files over a network.

Some issues exclusive to Intel-based Macs

The reports also point out that only the Intel version of the Mac OS X 10.4.11 Update will address the above issues, as a single FireWire bug exists in that version that may prevent drives from mounting.

In its current Delta form, Mac OS X 10.4.11 presently amounts to a 65MB disc image for PowerPC Macs and a 119MB disc image for Intel Macs.

Interestingly enough, previous builds have addressed other issues with the operating system that are not exclusive to just the Intel version. Some of those issues are well documented and known, including, WebCore; SearchKit; enabling and disabling Bluetooth; Directory Services; CoreAudio and m4a files; Networking and Cisco VPN; File Manager; and POSIX volumes.

Although some believe Mac OS X is relatively free of issues and few updates are needed, the combined number of fixes and code corrections in Mac OS X 10.4.11 has now surpassed three dozen.

The software's expected release is slated for later this month, but some are claiming it could come in October.