Leopard - The Upgrade Diary
So, yes Melinda and I bought a Leopard family license on a whim for our 3 macs, and yes had we got to wait in line 2.5 hours for a couple of t-shirts and a DVD in a fancy looking case, but for us it was all worth the effort and money.
Upgrading
When we got home I decided to be the first to do an upgrade, obviously first backing up my trusty Tiger install to an external drive. Two hours later I still didn’t have a running system as my upgrade had caused me an unresponsive (and unfortunately blue) startup screen, which didn’t have an error code but was quite similar to the Windows blue screen of death.
EDIT: This problem is now known to be related to a haxie container framework called Application Enhancer. If you did install ‘APE’, you should do a clean install.
I gave up soon after this and decided to just do a fresh install which went both faster and worked immediately. After me, Melinda tried an upgrade and hers ironically went without any bumps at all, so I guess my problem will only affect a small percentage of switchers. The official Apple support site already has a thread with 270 responses and maybe a few solutions.
In short: make sure you have a backup before you go into the process of upgrading as you might need to reset your tiger install or do a fresh install and transport the data.
3rd Party Applications
Once we both had Leopard running we started playing with its features and we were bot impressed by the speed. Leopard is fast, VERY FAST. Only a very few applications didn’t work properly though, mostly browser hacks like Saft and Inquisitor that use the now no longer supported InputManagers concept. We did find a little tool called PlugSuit that re-enables InputManager support and has let us use Inquisitor again (Saft didn’t work but SafariStand did most of what we wanted from Saft).
All and all I am happy with Leopard as it is a decent upgrade that, has a few very interesting features for everyone and probably doesn’t give you all the trouble an upgrade to Vista would give you.
A few unboxing photos
