Leopard Catch up
So I've been running Leopard for just over a month. Leopard came out as a late Birthday present for me and I took a complete clone of my system before installing, using Super Duper.
I'd read the warnings, took the advice, heard the horrors stories - a la the blue screen of waiting thing. I had hoped I wouldn't be afflicted by such massive problems.
I completed an install and got the all new shiny happy you've install something window...
Prior to that I'd had about six hours worth of disk mis reads / install failures. This was contrasted with how easily I'd found the previous two installs on iMacs. I'm putting the mis reads down to the robustness of the drives in the iMacs compared to my over used MacBook Pro.
I certainly wasn't aware of the Application Enhancer installed on my system - well until I thought about it. When did I do this thinking ? ... whilst I was sitting looking at a pale blue screen along with a spinning beach ball.
However the online solution worked to solve the, now discovered, application enhancer problem - turns out I had installed it via Shape shifter, which I won/bought in the mac hiest competition.
Next problem was during install my user had lost admin privileges - again a well enough documented problem by the time I encountered it... still this wasn't shaping up to the be easy click and go that 1) Apple Promised or 2) I had indeed experienced on the two other systems or 3) I had enjoyed when upgrading to Tiger about a year ago.
With all that out of the way, I ran Leopard for the first time on my own machine - and it was beautiful.
I had the usual warnings from the Application transfer but that was merely a static IP warning.
"Errors and Warnings:
- A static IP address on AirPort has been transferred to this new machine. Make sure to not connect your old computer to the same network." - which I can deal with without resorting to google.
First for me to see if all this hype about Mail.app speed boost was justified... a quick Database upgrade followed and was genuinely painless.
Along with a warning about some mail bundles that were incompatible with the new mail.app
I found Leopard knocked out a number of normal things I was used to on Tiger, like logging on to windows shared printers...
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5697771&tstart=0
I've had more than normal problems on my Cisco VPN connection - which could feasibly down to Cisco. Which has caused me to be resetting the client before using it.
sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart
When in work and exiting via the proxy I've found PubSubAgent crashing every hour to half hour - apparently it's something to do with the cache.
And for a while I (a couple of days) had this issue with the iCal icon- which I'd initially been extremely excited about until I found it not working correctly.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5657578�
I fixed this by dragging the icon off and on the dock a couple of times.
I had and still have this issue with dragging items to the Mail icon to create a new mail with the attachment.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5697621�
On my folk's computer I found too late that Leopard doesn't play nice with the new Lexmark 7550 after trying the drivers supplied, old drivers and all suggestions here...
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5663176#5663176
and
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1200609&tstart=0
Finally it appeared Lexmark took the cheap option and waited for Leopard to be released instead of buying a developer copy to ensure their products were going to be compatible, and now we've gotta wait until January...
http://www.lexmark.com/lexmark/sequentialem/home/0,6959,204816596_666691854_682634834_en,00.html
After the formalities it was down to the fun stuff.
Stuff I like:
Data detectors
Time machine (albeit not for me but for fam it's invaluable)
Definitely snappier iLife apps including iPhoto
Actually the new menu bar, although I reckon with dark wallpaper it's distracting.
New Spotlight functionality... simply amazing and combined with improved dictionary functions - genius.
Stuff I don't like:
Stacks.... seriously whilst it might be useful in the dock don't force it on me instead of folders.
Some missing apps.
The abysmal login speed on an active directory.
The useless permissions "clarification" on SMB shares.
I'm not too keen on how OS X now adds shares to the side bar, or doesn't unless you tell it too!
Stuff I don't seem to care about:
Spaces
Personally time machine doesn't do anything for me on a laptop that I end up cloning myself.
Back to my mac, as I use a laptop for all my stuff.
Accessibility options.
Overall once bit and bobs were out of the way I have found Leopard a joy to use, improved iCal, Mail and even terminal windows are great. Despite my issues with the upgrade the other machines went fine. I'd recommend Leopard for some. For me it was the little features that I've fallen in love with and not so much the banner features. Although for most Time machine is the must have function.
It was interesting despite me being told by some fan boys that the SMB share issue was Microsoft's because "they are not applying permissions correctly", an argument which some validity. That one of the prime fixes in the 10.5.1 update, issued only three weeks after launch, was a fix to the weird permissions thing on Leopard. This was a minor issue for us in work as only a small number of people login to the active directory with macs on Leopard, so I had manually updated their permissions to be Leopard tolerant.
The reason I upgraded was to explore, especially given that we have a 30 machine upgrade license for our suite of iMacs I needed to know whether it was safe to upgrade... for now - until the Active Directory speed issues are solved those machines are staying on Tiger.
==Update==
Something I forgot
Toast doesn't work but at all in version 7 apparently Roxio are working on an update...
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5934123&tstart=0
and WhatSize needed an update on Leopard.
I'd read the warnings, took the advice, heard the horrors stories - a la the blue screen of waiting thing. I had hoped I wouldn't be afflicted by such massive problems.
I completed an install and got the all new shiny happy you've install something window...
Prior to that I'd had about six hours worth of disk mis reads / install failures. This was contrasted with how easily I'd found the previous two installs on iMacs. I'm putting the mis reads down to the robustness of the drives in the iMacs compared to my over used MacBook Pro.
I certainly wasn't aware of the Application Enhancer installed on my system - well until I thought about it. When did I do this thinking ? ... whilst I was sitting looking at a pale blue screen along with a spinning beach ball.
However the online solution worked to solve the, now discovered, application enhancer problem - turns out I had installed it via Shape shifter, which I won/bought in the mac hiest competition.
Next problem was during install my user had lost admin privileges - again a well enough documented problem by the time I encountered it... still this wasn't shaping up to the be easy click and go that 1) Apple Promised or 2) I had indeed experienced on the two other systems or 3) I had enjoyed when upgrading to Tiger about a year ago.
With all that out of the way, I ran Leopard for the first time on my own machine - and it was beautiful.
I had the usual warnings from the Application transfer but that was merely a static IP warning.
"Errors and Warnings:
- A static IP address on AirPort has been transferred to this new machine. Make sure to not connect your old computer to the same network." - which I can deal with without resorting to google.
First for me to see if all this hype about Mail.app speed boost was justified... a quick Database upgrade followed and was genuinely painless.
Along with a warning about some mail bundles that were incompatible with the new mail.app
I found Leopard knocked out a number of normal things I was used to on Tiger, like logging on to windows shared printers...
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5697771&tstart=0
I've had more than normal problems on my Cisco VPN connection - which could feasibly down to Cisco. Which has caused me to be resetting the client before using it.
sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart
When in work and exiting via the proxy I've found PubSubAgent crashing every hour to half hour - apparently it's something to do with the cache.
And for a while I (a couple of days) had this issue with the iCal icon- which I'd initially been extremely excited about until I found it not working correctly.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5657578�
I fixed this by dragging the icon off and on the dock a couple of times.
I had and still have this issue with dragging items to the Mail icon to create a new mail with the attachment.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5697621�
On my folk's computer I found too late that Leopard doesn't play nice with the new Lexmark 7550 after trying the drivers supplied, old drivers and all suggestions here...
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5663176#5663176
and
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1200609&tstart=0
Finally it appeared Lexmark took the cheap option and waited for Leopard to be released instead of buying a developer copy to ensure their products were going to be compatible, and now we've gotta wait until January...
http://www.lexmark.com/lexmark/sequentialem/home/0,6959,204816596_666691854_682634834_en,00.html
After the formalities it was down to the fun stuff.
Stuff I like:
Data detectors
Time machine (albeit not for me but for fam it's invaluable)
Definitely snappier iLife apps including iPhoto
Actually the new menu bar, although I reckon with dark wallpaper it's distracting.
New Spotlight functionality... simply amazing and combined with improved dictionary functions - genius.
Stuff I don't like:
Stacks.... seriously whilst it might be useful in the dock don't force it on me instead of folders.
Some missing apps.
The abysmal login speed on an active directory.
The useless permissions "clarification" on SMB shares.
I'm not too keen on how OS X now adds shares to the side bar, or doesn't unless you tell it too!
Stuff I don't seem to care about:
Spaces
Personally time machine doesn't do anything for me on a laptop that I end up cloning myself.
Back to my mac, as I use a laptop for all my stuff.
Accessibility options.
Overall once bit and bobs were out of the way I have found Leopard a joy to use, improved iCal, Mail and even terminal windows are great. Despite my issues with the upgrade the other machines went fine. I'd recommend Leopard for some. For me it was the little features that I've fallen in love with and not so much the banner features. Although for most Time machine is the must have function.
It was interesting despite me being told by some fan boys that the SMB share issue was Microsoft's because "they are not applying permissions correctly", an argument which some validity. That one of the prime fixes in the 10.5.1 update, issued only three weeks after launch, was a fix to the weird permissions thing on Leopard. This was a minor issue for us in work as only a small number of people login to the active directory with macs on Leopard, so I had manually updated their permissions to be Leopard tolerant.
The reason I upgraded was to explore, especially given that we have a 30 machine upgrade license for our suite of iMacs I needed to know whether it was safe to upgrade... for now - until the Active Directory speed issues are solved those machines are staying on Tiger.
==Update==
Something I forgot
Toast doesn't work but at all in version 7 apparently Roxio are working on an update...
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5934123&tstart=0
and WhatSize needed an update on Leopard.
posted by M at 6:21 PM
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