Upgrading to Leopard, Part 1 of 2 — OS Upgrade
Unlike alot of people that ran right out and upgraded to Leopard on the first day it was available as a general release, I waited. I wanted to upgrade. And I was looking forward to it. But having experienced an upgrade that broke applications in sometimes unexpected ways before, I thought it wise to sit and wait this one out.
Why Upgrade Now
Now that the first major patch release is out (OS X 10.5.1) and after having read numerous reports about the new features, OS improvements to stability and the user experience, and the recent bug fixes, I upgraded. The upgrade went smoothly, but it wasn’t without quirks.
Installing was an interesting experience
It took close to two hours for the installation procedure to complete. While the progress bar accurately reflected the installation progress timing, the installation timer was noticeably broken. It raced along like time for a relativistic observer. An upgrade install on my G4 PPC Powerbook and on a (nearly) brand new MacBook Pro quoted initial times-to-completion of over four hours and then converged to zero as the install proceeded. This was slightly annoying, but I guess it was better than having broken expectations of an installation time that continually gets adjusted up instead of down (Windows timers are notorious for this).
About halfway through the installation I had a flash of horror when I couldn’t recall if I was presented with a screen to choose an installation type. (No, I’m not an idiot, I didn’t realize that I was never prompted to choose an installation type until this point). The minimal installation progress screen displayed little more than an “Installing Leopard” header and a progress bar across the now famous ‘cosmic’ OS X purple backdrop. Apparently the engineers in Cupertino didn’t feel the need to provide any distinguishing text for fresh installs, archive installs, and upgrades in the install-progress UI panel. I found this frustrating and consider it a major oversight of the installation sequence. I can only imagine what Genius Bar employees will need to contend with when a user comes in claiming that Leopard ‘ate’ his computer and deleted everything.
What Worked
Almost everything. About two hours after the installation I had an upgrade Leopard install ready to go. It seems like may other people had the same results using the upgrade option. All my applications were intact and I experienced no major upgrade-related problems.
Quirks
Now it was time to upgrade to OS X 10.5.1. This was painful as this was when a number of short-lived quirks and annoyances came to bear.
After I installed Leopard my Spotlight index was cleared and needed to be entirely rebuilt. As you might imagine, my powerbook was not exactly responsive while it re-indexed every piece of data I had. This intense disk use slowed my machine to a crawl during the patch upgrade as Spotlight and Software Update competed for disk seek and IO operations.
While this was happening I thought it might be a good idea to to kick back and read some email. So, I fired up Mail. This was a big mistake. Like my Spotlight indices, my Mail indices (i.e. Smartlist internals) were also gone. I use Mail as a local backup of my entire GMail mailbox, so I have about 2GB worth of mail scattered about a few dozen Smart Folders and Archives. After I opened Mail it took the better part of 15 minutes to reconstruct these indices and reconstruct my Smart Folders. While this was happening I could hear my hard disk thrashing about, vigorously seeking from Softare Update install, to Mail indexing, to Spotlight read/write, and back, all while I sat and waited for the curiously colorful beach ball to stop spinning.
On the MacBook, the system didn’t hang unresponsively, it was just sluggish for a while.
After about an hour I was done. I ran through the list of instaled applications I had, firing them up one-by-one to make sure they still worked and - to my amazement - everything appeared to work. I was ready to continue to phase two — installing my dev toolchain: XCode, Fink, Python, etc. I actually just started this, so for details you will have to read on next time.
References
[1] Ars Technica OS X Leopard In-Depth Review, (long, but packed with information)
[2] Apple Official OS X Leopard 10.5.1 Patch Notes
[3] AppleInsider OS X Leopard 10.5.1 Discussion
[4] MacRumors OS X Leopard 10.5.1 Discussion
[5] LifeHacker Leopard Clean-Install vs. Archive-Install vs. Upgrade Survey
[6] One user’s take on the new Leopard theme
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