Wednesday evening, I finally got around to upgrading my iMac to OS X 10.5 (“Leapord,” a word which only appears to occur in the installation screens). As I’ve had a number of wonky things happening after upgrading my hard drive last month, I simply decided to do a backup and then the “Erase and Install” option. The beauty of this is, I was simply able to use the Migration Manager tool to bring back in all my apps, documents, and settings from my bootable backup (I use SuperDuper! for creating backups, which is the only third party app involved in this whole epic event).
The upgrade went well, though it did take quite a while. I didn’t suffer from any of the “blue screen” issues that a few folks have been reporting. I did, on the other hand, get a kernel panic screen (link for example, not the actual incident in question) within about two minutes of rebooting after the upgrade and migration. It seems Firefox 2.0.0.8 didn’t play well with OS X 10.5 despite it being billed as compatible. A quick upgrade and all was well.
I also used the opportunity to get rid of my incapacitated Windows Boot Camp partition (one a few things that didn’t survive the hard drive upgrade last month). I create a new partition and got Windows XP re-installed without too much trouble. I do however, hate the fact that my bluetooth mouse and keyboard don’t work during half of the installation process. It’s a pain to have to hunt down a USB mouse or try and tab through windows to get to the right dialog box. Anyway, Windows boots fine and I can also use the XP partition with Parallels again, which is extremely handy (and going to be necessary for work in the future, I suspect – structural engineering is a Windows-only game).
I spent about an hour last night getting my SP 2 copy of Windows XP up with the latest security updates and such. I plan to use WinClone to make a solid backup that I can always go back to in the event of emergency and to speed up when a re-install is again necessary (which is inevitable, so I might as well make it fast and painless to do).
Now, I still have to get my virtual machine copy of Ubuntu linux updated to 7.10! Of course, who would have thought that updating Linux would be the easiest and fastest of them all? (I say this because I’ve already updated my workbench/ testing machine in the basement, and it was a breeze.)
Oh, and I also need to upgrade Angela’s iBook as soon as we can figure out why her bus-powered FireWire drive isn’t connecting to her laptop. It’s a good think I actually enjoy doing this stuff or it would seem like a real chore…
If you’re planning on installing Leopard on the iBook, let me know how it goes. I was wondering if/how it would run on one of those.
Oh, I wish I could tell you that it all went well. I finally got everything working on her iBook last night. I ended up having to install Leopard twice because after copying over her apps the first go round, something was making Finder hang up after booting. I think it was her older version of The Missing Sync, but I’m really not sure.
Now that it’s running, it’s not bad at all. I don’t feel that it’s any slower than 10.4 and perhaps it’s even a bit snappier.