Friday, October 26, 2007

Leopard, great, but not totally without problems

Ben and I were first in line at MacCentric at Chatswood in Sydney to buy MacOS X10.5 Leopard today.

I rushed home and installed it as an upgrade on my Intel iMac. An upgrade takes quite a long time.

When done, Spotlight didn't seem to be doing anything. For some reason it had excluded my internal drive, a preferences change was required to fix this.

After removing my internal drive from the exclude list it seems to be taking hours to index. After an hour it's only 3% done.

So far, all my applications work just fine. Safari seems clearly faster than before, Mail is good. I showed my daughter some of the new features in iChat and she collapsed in laughter when seeing fish swimming behind Ben - this OS is going to be a hit for all the wrong reasons I think.

Tried to get started with Time Machine backups but I need a really big drive by the looks of things. Fair enough.

I ran in to some problems with .Mac syncing. I kind of got stuck in a loop resolving conflicts.

It's a pity that a new install these days involves indexing a large drive which takes time and kills the CPU for some time (hours). This gives an impression that things are going slowly - perhaps this phase should be deferred until the user has played with all the new toys for a while.

Anyhow, lots of new things to play with: Spaces looks great, I do like the new Dock, Mail seems more capable, and I can't wait to learn about Cocoa 2.0. A fun weekend lies ahead...

Updates

I've done a few installs now and here's my notes on an updated machine:
  • Installs are much faster than an update
  • I've had some minor problems with PPTP VPNs (for one thing the connect/disconnect menu item gets a bit confused) I've also had traffic stop and attempting to ping then gives me some error about being out of space.
  • iTunes has hung on me
  • Previously I built my own python but this causes problems for xcode
  • I can't build python 2.5.1 at the moment - compile error
  • All my apps just work
Due to the messing I've done under the hood, such as building my own python in the past, I'm now backing up and preparing to do a fresh install.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous9:32 AM

    Hey Pete - I've also installed Leopard. A couple of apps don't work for me:

    * SnapXPro (a shame because this is something I use a bit - hopefully the vendor will get on to this quickly); and
    * ServerSiren - frankly this app has always been a bit buggy and the vendor needs to fix things up period.

    Titan Class Vision works beautifully. :-) Actually I'm surprised about this given that I thought I'd have to consider resolution independence within my OpenGL world. Looks as though the OS has magically taken care of this for me. Impressive. I'll have to look more into it to understand.

    The one area that does puzzle me right now is the firewall. I don't know if you've played with that yet. I'm running the uw imapd via launchd (xinetd functionality is replaced with launchd in Leopard). imap works, but not if I start the firewall. I've posted a message on the Leopard discussion forum to see if anyone can help. In case you don't know the firewall has changed dramatically for Leopard; for the better too although I'm lost with regards to configuring specific services.

    Xcode 3.0 installed well and recognised by existing projects. A little project preference tweaking was required but nothing unreasonable.

    All in all, impressive. I'm looking forward to "playing" more.

    Cheers,
    Christopher

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