OS X Odds & Ends: OS X 10.1 update for free?; Working with disk images follow-up; SCCSerial.ketch patch disables Internet

Mac OS X 10.1 update to be free at stores? The Wall Street Journal article that we cited yesterday contained this statement: "Apple plans to start distributing version 10.1 this month. It will be built into new machines. People who currently use OS X can get the 10.1 upgrade free on CDs that will be available in some stores."

The Mac Night Owl site received confirmation of this from Apple, noting that not all stores may have these CDs: "The policy is still being developed, though, so it's not certain just which dealers will get a stock of CDs. At the very least, you can expect The Apple Store will get its share. Regardless, these will be update CDs, which means that you have to be running Mac OS X already for the installation to work. This won't be a way to get a free copy of Mac OS X, if you don't already have one."

Working with disk images: a follow-up A reader claims that the failure of disk images to unmount in certain situations (as reported here yesterday) is fixed in the soon-to-be-released Mac OS X 10.1 He adds that: "It is also now possible to directly copy a disk image to a hard drive. A drag and drop of a disk image to a hard drive results only in the creation of an alias. However, holding down the Option key while drag and dropping invokes a copy." [Note: In 10.0.x, you typically get a "privileges" error if you try this.]

SCCSerial.ketch patch disables Internet Connect? A word of caution: two readers (Yuri Fokin and Juan Valencia) who have applied the AppleSCCSerial.kext patch (see previous coverage) found that the Connect button in the Internet Connect application no longer worked. If this happens to you, the solution is to revert to the previous version of the extension (hopefully, you made a back-up before applying the patch. Otherwise, you can get a copy of the extension from the System/Library/Extensions folder on the OS X Install CD. If a newer version is available in an OS X update, you will need to extract it from the relevant update .pkg file, using the method we have described here previously. [Note: While we have not checked our update receipts to see if there is a newer version listed, both the CD version and the installed version on our drive is listed as version 1.0.8, although the installed version has a later modification date.]

What exactly to receipts files do? In this MacFixIt Forums thread (Receipts files and installing software) we try to sort out exactly how Mac OS X uses receipts files (see also previous coverage).