Mac OS 10.5 Leopard Adventures
Well, it is beautiful and stunning. I’m talking about the latest Apple Operating System for the Macintosh, OS X Leopard (OS 10.5). But it is not without its problems. Seems a certain small percent of people installing it have had problems. I was one of them. How bad? Well, for whatever reason our hardware guru had, finally, to completely reformat my hard disk and do a clean install. Now, a clean install is a good thing every so often, but when you don’t plan on having to do a clean install and reformat your hard disk, not so good. And, add to this the fact that it just so happens my company is switching over to a new mail server this week, which is consuming a lot of time and attention of our tech crew, well, it made for nearly three whole days of being without my beloved Macintosh. But yesterday, it came back from the hospital and is now proudly running Mac OS X. It is a beautiful new operating system. The feature that is really, really cool is the ability to browse through the contents of your various folders in the same way you look at album covers in iTune. Really cool. I’m getting used to some of the design tweeks to the system. I really like the way you can preview contents of folders in the dock. And the backup utility included, "Time Machine" is a great solution and help for keeping your hard disk backed up daily, weekly and monthly: all of this is now done automatically for you. Just plug in an external hard disk, and Time Machine does the rest. So, warning to all of you looking to upgrade to Leopard: be careful. An update is due out around Thanksgiving supposedly to take care of whatever the bugs are in the system causing install problems. But if you are a Mac fan, you are going to love the new features. I know PC users are used to all sorts of glitches, problems, crashes and such, but it is so rare on the Mac, when it happens, it is very traumatic. Your sympathy is appreciated. Grin.
I didn’t have any problems on the installation side of things with Leopard, but there were some issues afterwards. My Keychain wasn’t accessible for some reason and I had to figure out that I needed to do a “Keychain First Aid” on it. My external hard drive wasn’t playing nice with Time Machine, and I had to figure out that I needed to reformat *it* to an Apple-friendly file system. On the whole, the bugs were at worst mildly serious and required some internet dumpster-diving to figure out the solutions.
The only real problem that remains is that my Macbook gets VERY hot while running Time Machine — the internal temperature is in excess of 170 degrees F and it’s actually physically uncomfortable to touch the outside. Hopefully the update coming in a couple of weeks will include some firmware to help this. (Also, some of my third-party software no longer works with Leopard.)
But on the whole I am liking it very much. Cover Flow in Finder is a lifesaver for visual people like myself.
I decided to wait this update out for a while since it doesn’t really have anything I need which tiger (osx 10.4) doesn’t already provide. I won’t use time machine and one thing I’ve seen which I know I do not like is the new transparent menu bar and the new overly polished dock. I’m hoping apple will provide a fix so the user can turn off the transparency and have a dock like tigers. I’m one of those who still misses OS9 so take that for whatever it might mean.
McCain reply: After spending a few hours with Leopard, I know I definitely would not want to go back. Cover flow is a lifesaver if you work with photos at all. There are several little tweeks that are fantastic, for instance, in the Finder you now can tell it to display all files you’ve worked on today, yesterday, etc. VERY handy and a big improvement. You’ll enjoy it once you start using it. The transparent thing is no biggie to me, but I use the Aqua blue background. There are a lot of great new features. I’m very pleased with it.
I just received a new Mac Mini to marry to my Cinema Display in my study. It didn’t come preloaded. The process took much longer then I expected, but it is working flawlessly. I’m getting use to some of the new items, but the transition continues to be an easy one. I also put it on my 4 year old 12″ PowerBook. Again, it works well. My 5 year eMac was too old. Pax.
The antimac person in me is feeling a bit of schadenfreude with the installation experience, but the computer geek in me who is a bit more of a saint feels your pain. Botched installation processes are never fun.