Leopard Install Stories

MacBook Pro (32-bit): cake. Some minor reshuffling since I run a full Apache+mod_python+MySQL 5 instance on my laptop complete with crazy ssh tunnels for running Facebook application callbacks while behind NAT. A lot of the junk I replaced on Tiger (e.g., Apache 2.2.6, mod_python 3.3.1, Python 2.5) all come stock with Leopard so there’s a lot less modification to the base system needed to get my primary development platform working again.

PowerMac G5: trickier. This machine was my former desktop and had all kinds of crazy stuff installed on it, from Adobe Version Cue (evil!) to Final Cut Pro 3 and a billion codecs. In short, lots of really creaky old warez. It runs a public-facing sshd for my port forwarding needs and one of the main ways I use this box is over VNC, both of which continue to work fine. It’s also the wireless router for the house, and has a nonstandard keyboard and mouse, and is connected to a 60″ Sony TV instead of a monitor. All of this again continued to work without a hiccup. I did have the craziest problem — Finder refused to launch! I took spindumps with sample to try to diagnose the problem, traced this down to some of the crazy codecs that come with the old version of FCP. Moved those aside, rebooted, problem cleared up. The next major issue was with the drobo, for whatever reason the fsck on the first boot after install failed and the drive mounted read-only. This panicked me a little (egads, my 600GB of media!), but I ran fsck manually and remounted and everything was fine, aside from needing to add a 4th drive…

MacBook (64-bit): cake. This is Annika’s laptop so no major issues, very little installed on it so not much to go wrong.

I ran some really early betas of Leopard, so my home directory (which I always copy around from machine to machine) had some tainted Leopard iCal data. Before ugprading to Leopard I took an iCal backup from a known good Tiger machine, restored into the Leopard machine, and reset .Mac sync with the good data and all is well on all three machines.

No major issues with the iPhone or anything like that. I recently upgraded to 1.1.1 despite claiming that I’d never give up my NES emulator, mostly because the iPhone SDK has been announced and I can go without Blaster Master until February of next year.

Spotlight performance is blisteringly fast and this is the first Finder that almost does not suck. Cover Flow is a wonderful way to flip through the movies on the media center, and the improved network browsing and disk mounting are nice in a multiple-machine environment like my house. Front Row is supported on all hardware (even This Old G5). iChat 3 is pretty nice, and the updated iCal is a lot more usable than the previous revision. Mail.app sees additional performance improvements, presumably from the improved Spotlight backend. Overall I think Apple’s engineers have tweaked a little more performance out of the hardware, especially in the graphics arena — on all systems there is a perceived improvement in the “snappiness” of the GUI.

The huge reflective Dock that everyone hates actually looks pretty good on the media center G5. On the other machines I use a left-hand side Dock which is now just a tasteful outline instead of the crazy reflective madness.

At the moment I am liking the new cat, there are probably some other lurking issues but it’s pretty nice .0 release as far as I can tell.