The OS Triathalon

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…

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Categorized as Geek

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

2 comments

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

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