Saturday, October 27, 2007

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Like most early orderers, my copy of the Mac OS X Leopard upgrade came in Friday morning. Rather than install it on my main computer, I opted to first try Apple's new operating system on my G4 PowerBook (12" G4 1.5 GHz model). I don't have all my disk arrangements worked out yet for my G5 Mac, and I need to keep a partition for running version 10.4, as I still have a few Classic (Mac OS 9 and earlier) applications I run from time to time. I'm also not sure how much of a hard drive I'll need for Apple's new Time Machine backup. And, the PowerBook has a good, recent backup, in case I mess up and trash the whole drive!

Before beginning the install, I tidied up the PowerBook's drive a bit by repairing permissions and dumping my soon-to-be useless OS 9 and earlier applications. I also dumped some files I had on other drives to make sure I had plenty of room for the install. I run a 100 GB 7200 RPM hard drive in the PowerBook (a hard drive swap you don't want to do yourself -- 41 screws, I think), but had lots of old image files from work that weren't essential.

When I launched the install by rebooting into the Leopard DVD installer, I quickly took a side trip to the Utilities menu to launch Apple's Disk Utility to repair the drive and repair disk permissions yet again. The drive repair noted and repaired a small header error, so it was definitely worth the time. Apple may have included an automatic check of the hard drive at some point later in the install, but I wasn't taking any chances.

I chose the default Upgrade option of the installer, as I didn't want to mess with having to reinstall all my apps and settings. My PowerBook is configured to log into our network at work and many other networks where I regularly visit and do presentations and demonstrations. Since the PowerBook has a rather slow DVD, it took the installer 20 minutes just to check the installation disk before displaying an initial estimate of almost 4 hours of time remaining for the rest of the install. As it progressed, the installer revised the time downward considerably with the total installation time being just less than an hour and a half. When I rebooted, it took 4-5 minutes before getting to my new desktop, including over a minute of the blue screen of death. So be patient on reboot after a Leopard install.

Once completed, I was pleasantly surprised to find that other than losing the ability to run Classic applications, nothing appeared to have broken. Favorite add-ons such as DragThing, Macaroni, and MaxMenus, open source offerings such as Vienna and Stellarium, and all of the commercial applications I used the rest of the day still worked. Photoshop (CS) and Dreamweaver (2004) seemed to take a bit longer to launch the first time as did many other apps, but they worked. I did have to do the usual trick to get my Motorola v710 cell phone to sync in iSync, but that's become routine with each system update. Even network connections to our Exchange server and my other computers still functioned well.

I think I'm about ready to try Leopard on a partition of my dual G5. I'm writing this update as Carbon Copy Cloner returns my files to my newly formatted hard drives and partitions, a major undertaking since I'm such a packrat with files.

(Note: For those of you wondering, the installer does check the machine specs before installation. I booted my 733 MHz G4 QuickSilver from the Leopard installation DVD. When I tried to install, it displayed a "no-go" message. Guess I'll need a chip equal to or greater than the 867 MHz stated minimum.)

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