Mac Problem with SL may have a long term solution soon

For those of you using newer MacBook Pro's to access Second Life, you'd had to deal with freezing and then needed to hard reboot - never a good thing for a computer. There was a work around published not that long ago, but that is still only a work around and not a solution.

Well, it seems as if the Linden Gears are hard at work. This noted from todays Linden Official Blog

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/01/23/new-windlight-viewer-77495-mac-talk/#more-1574
You’ll notice the top bug on there is NVidia 8600 Mac Book Pros are dropping to software shaders. This had effectively made WindLight unusable for a vast number of MacBook Pro users. It was no small feat as it required an entire re-factoring of how we do our shader loading, to get around some known issues with how Apple links their shaders. We got some fringe benefits with this too- better framerates on some machines, possibly some improved stability, etc. Many kudos to BigPapi Linden for his tireless work in this field. So play and have fun!

BUT

This does not solve two major issues that are known with these machines:

* VWR-1979 - Memory leak with 8600m GT on MacBook Pro
* VWR-1749: Second Life viewer client freezes on MacBook Pro

These are major issues that can cause the viewer to crash and system resources to get taken up, to the point where a system reboot may be necessary. These are bad issues. But there’s good news. Apple knows of the cause and a fix is on its way- trust us. These issues shouldn’t remain in the wild for long. So, to all of those with 8600s, play for the first time, but it may be in short spurts for now!