Summersault Weblog

As I did with the release of Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, I thought I would share a few notes about my experience in upgrading to the latest version of the Mac operating system, 10.5 “Leopard”.
If you just want to hear about all of the good stuff I’m experiencing as a result of the upgrade, you can skip to the bottom line.

First, I’ll note that it was important to me to wait until the announcement of the first “point release” of the operating system - version 10.5.1 - before upgrading. With any new major update of an operating system, there tends to be kinks that don’t get worked out until it’s in the hands of the masses. And so whether it’s a server or a desktop, if it’s a critical system, I’ve always found it prudent to wait until that first minor update is out, which usually corrects any serious bugs. (Of course, I’ve ignored my own advice on that plenty of times too.)

As others have noted, the preferred way to do an OS X upgrade is to use the “Archive and Install” option, which basically moves user files and preferences to a safe place, gets the old operating system out of the way (but keeps it around just in case), and puts the new one in place. This is better than doing an upgrade that only touches files that have been changed between versions and leaves everything else in place, because it insures you’ll have a “clean” system, at least at the operating system level. So, I did that, and the upgrade process itself went smoothly, again taking about 45 minutes.

One of the preparation items I did was to create a new temporary user account with administrator privileges, which I logged into post-upgrade to see how things worked before logging into my *real* account. The logic here is that if there is some major problem with the new OS or its applications, I’ll avoid messing with any of my critical user files which might be updated as soon as I login for the first time. I also used this temporary admin account to install the 10.5.1 software update.

And that was where I hit the first and only major snag so far. Leopard uses a new technique for installing software updates that require a reboot - it asks you to reboot your computer first, and then processes the updates when the system comes back up (whereas previously it would process the updates during the existing login session, and then reboot into a new login prompt). When the system rebooted in its attempt to install 10.5.1, somewhere at the end of the processing (I didn’t see because I was sautéing mushrooms in the kitcehn), it had a kernel panic. This was quite disconcerting, but when I restarted the system, everything came up properly, the OS reports itself as being version 10.5.1, and I haven’t had any problems since. We’ll see if that continues.

Beyond that, the Leopard upgrader pretty much takes care of getting the system back to a usable state with all of your critical settings in place. It did leave a few things out:

• Printer Profiles - as with Tiger, an Archive & Install doesn’t carry over the printer profiles setup with the previous operating system. I wonder if it’s just too complex to do, or if they haven’t bothered yet, figuring most people only have one printer attached to their system with fairly generic drivers. For me, it’s somewhat of a pain becaus there are at least three printers I regularly use, and for all of them I have multiple print settings saved - all of that now needs to be recreated, installed from driver disks, etc.
• Contents of /usr/local/bin - I use the Enigmail extension for my mail program, Thunderbird, to handle encrypting and decrypting messages. *It* still works fine, but the underlying encryption program it relies on, gpg, did not. When I looked into it, it seems that the gpg program (along with a few others I depend on) had been installed in a directory “/usr/local/bin” on my old system, and Leopard didn’t copy that over. I did that manually:
  

  # mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
  # cp -p /Previous\ Systems.localized/2007-12-15_1457/usr/local/bin/* /usr/local/bin/

  and that seems to have taken care of it.

There were just a few other minor issues that I’ve noticed so far:

• In Tiger, I had a folder on my desktop full of aliases to frequently used applications. Further, I created a link to that folder in my Dock so that I could easily browse the available programs by cilck-and-holding on the folder icon in the Dock. The notion of “stacks” has formalized that behavior in Leopard, but apparently the Stack uses the first icon in the folder as its Dock icon, instead of the icon for the folder itself. Some folks have already put together a workaround that involves a weird little transparency overlay icon and that’s been fine, but it would be nice if the OS supported the more intuitive behavior.
• A few times now, usually when messing with network settings, I’ve been asked to enter the password for the “login” keychain. I’ve tried my usual admin account password (usually because I didn’t notice that it was asking for something else), and that hasn’t worked. In every case, as my password tries expired, the system continued on doing what it was doing and didn’t complain further, so I’m hoping and assuming that it hasn’t prevented my changes from taking effect. But it is still annoying, and hard to believe that it doesn’t represent some deeper issue I’ll have to deal with eventually.

Now, on to some of the good stuff I’ve been experiencing as a result of the upgrade:

• The OS feels faster. I didn’t expect this - usually, operating system upgrades imply at least a mild case of featuritis, where flashy new things are prioritized over speed and stability. But in the case of Leopard, the interface is more responsive, applications open more quickly, Spotlight returns search results more quickly and accurately, and things just generally seem zippier. We’ll see how long it lasts.
• My applications run faster. This is worth highlighting on its own because one of the tools I spend much of my work day with, the Mozilla Firefox web browser, is *so* much faster on Leopard than it was on Tiger. I mean, web pages that I thought were just plain slow before are coming right up. Tab switching, dynamic component (such as Flash players) loading, and scrolling are also clearly much faster. Again, not at all expected, and very much appreciated.
• Spaces is excellent. Apple’s virtual desktop solution is not only on par with how the X-Windows system in Unix has been doing this for many years, they’ve added their usual dash of interface innovation and improvements. There have been some software apps for doing this in OS X for some time now, but they always felt slow to me, or too far on the outside of what the rest of the OS was doing. With Spaces, I feel more productive already.
• The Finder improvements are nice. Not amazing, but nice. In most cases, the positive changes are ones of simplification - more consistency, fewer things to mess with, more obvious ways to manipulate the files and folders. (The exception to simplification is the integration of the “cover flow” view into the Finder windows, and so far I’ve found it totally gratuitous…I’m sure the marketing folks at Apple are pleased, though, as it looks pretty.) The Spotlight searching system is more integrated into other places where you might search for something, so there’s definitely a convergence there that’s appreciated.
• Safari 3.0 is sweet. Though I’ll probably continue to use Firefox for the forseeable future because of its extension architecture, Safar is definitely a whole new world of fun and sleekness in web browsing. The one feature I think I *will* use extensively is the “Web Clips” integration with the OS X Dashboard, where you can basically tell it to show a small clip of a given web page as a standalone “widget.” As a system administrator who tries to keep an eye on various graphs and monitoring systems, having one-click/one-key access to these without pulling up a whole web page will be great.

Well, that’s the report so far on my upgrade from Tiger to Leopard. Mac OS X 10.5(.1) is certainly a visually-oriented update to the already highly functional and appealing interface, but the speed improvements alone have made it worthwhile for me.

If you’re taking the plunge and have any of your own experiences to report, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 11:24 am and is filed under Desktop Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.