Upgrading to Leopard from a Mac Consultant’s Point of View

by Nathan

Assuming my package does indeed arrive some time today (tuesday, 2008.04.15), I’ll be installing Leopard on my MacBook. I’m thinking about keeping a Tiger partition in case things go crazy. Then again, maybe I should simply go Leopard only on the internal drive. I can always keep a Tiger clone on an external hard drive.

The Leopard upgrade plan:

1. Back up data partition.
2. Back up account preferences.Boot into Leopard install disk.
3. Wipe drive.
4. Repartition into boot and data partitions (possibly a slightly bigger boot partition than I have now for Tiger).
5. Custom Install of Leopard.
6. Run Leopard updates.
7. Install applications.
8. Transfer data to data partition.

Chapter 2

Early returns are in and I believe the update can be tentatively called a success. Update is a bit of a misnomer as I did a clean install, sans Migration Assistant, instead preferring to bring over a few select preferences. FIOS made short work of the rather hefty updates. From my earlier posted list I only need to finish 8 and start 9 to complete my Leopard transition.

Interesting Leopard differences:

• Software updates install after selecting restart not immediately after downloading. Much better than the previous OS X way of installing while apps are running and then tending to strongly suggest an immediate reboot anyway.

• Launching a disallowed app when using an account with parental controls, now forces a dialogue prompt to appear instead of silently failing to run.

Access Prompt

This dialogue explains why the app did not launch and as an added bonus, an admin can simply enable access to this app to Always Allow or Allow once straight from the dialogue. I like to work from a Limited user account and only give myself access to apps that I actually use.

Continue reading »

Things have pretty much stabilized. I need to get all the features back on the forum, and content on the Wordpress pages. I belive the domain has fully propogated over to the new host (asmallorange.com). I hope to get the rest of this catch up work done by end of day tomorrow. [new, 7:40 pm Pacific, Thursday]

The forum is here here [edited 2pm Pacific, Thursday].

Please use the appleswitcher.com domain now. We’re switched. Don’t use http://207.210.105.84… that can be subject to slowness. [new, 2pm Pacific, Thursday]

Don’t bookmark that, the domain will resolve here shortly. It’s live now.

Many things are not yet hooked up. Take a deep breath, please. If you write about this and that not working, chances are it will be in a few hours, and people will think you’re a little crazy, if they don’t already.

If you want to write about the new look and what’s broken anyway, go ahead, but don’t direct posts at me because I’m aware of what’s not working and what has no content. I’ll be addessing these issues later today.

Thank you.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!