Official Mac OS X Leopard Installation & Discussion Thread (1 Viewer)

[Daryl L]

I've decided to do an "Erase and Install" when I get Leopard due to the upgrade problem many people have had (Blue Screen of Death some call it) caused by "Application Enhancer" being installed. "Logitech Control Center" installs "Application Enhancer" also unknowingly to many unless you read the readme before or during theinstallation which is how I ended up with "Application Enhancer" on my system. Info HERE on apple support page.

I have my macbook harddrive cloned and bootable on and external firewire drive. I know I can use OS X's "Migration Application" to migrate my user account (prefs, setting, files, apps, ect...) to Leopard, BUT! What I want to know is can I use "Migration Application" to specifically select only my Address Book addresses, Mail and Safari settings (bookmarks and cookies) to Leopard and nothing else?

My answer is a bit off topic so you can look at THIS post and you can see what I discovered to most likely be causing the problem.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

On the other side of a full Time Machine system restore, everything is looking good. All applications are operating properly and my Sprint wireless card is functioning again. Spotlight has to rebuild its index after the restore and Mail appears to go through its "updating" process again, but all mailboxes are fine.

Total time to restore 105GB of data was just over 70 minutes via FireWire 800. Only oddity during the process was at the start of the restore process when I was asked to choose a restore point. The most recent point was 1:30 pm...although I know backups had run at 2:30 and 3:30 as well. I selected 1:30 and after the restore was complete, I see everything that was on the machine as of 3:30 was there after the restore. Perhaps the 1:30 restore time was Pacific time instead of Central.

 

[Andrew Pratt]

I did a full clean and install as well and everything went very smoothly. The only issue I had was I forgot to back up by address book properly so I had to import them from my phone via BlueTooth which worked well enough.

 

[Yee-Ming]

I was told at the shop that it wouldn't be an upgrade, it would be a complete reinstall, to go from Panther to Leopard -- I asked because my iMac is still on Panther, whilst my MBP was on Tiger.

Leopard sure looks nice, although I haven't really had time to play with the new features much.

 

[DaveF]

My understanding is that you're not at risk if you're either running the current version of APE or you uninstall it before installing Leopard.

My concern, though, is whether my Logitech MX Revolution is going to work at all in Leopard, as Logitech uses APE for its mouse drivers.

Ah, Logitech is aware that Leopard users are having "issues" and is working on a fix.

 

[Daryl L]

Thx for that info, atleast their not ignoring or denying it.

 

[Andrew Pratt]

I had the logitech software installed for the MX510 I use with my MBP though I did a full wipe and reinstall. I then applied the logitech software in leo and everything appears to work fine.

 

[Chris Maynard]

Time Machine does not like Spaces.

 

[Chris Maynard]

Seems someone at Apple has a sense of humor.

This is the icon for your Windows based PCs in your network area of Finder.

 

[DaveF]

Can you expand on that?

 

[Chris Maynard]

Enable Spaces. Assign different apps to different Spaces. Go to one of your Spaces. Launch Time Machine. Watch it get confused on which Spaces it should be displaying. Users have experienced total lock ups doing this.

 

[Chris Maynard]

The back button works, thread originator is back. Those are the two problems I was aware of.

 

[Daryl L]

Thanks for the info Andrew. I think I'm gonna drop LCC and use SteerMouse from now on. I uninstalled LCC and installed Steermouse and it's works great with my Logitech Marble Mouse Trackball. And Steermouse supports Leopard. Uninstalling LCC left APE behind so I downloaded Application Enhancer and used it's Uninstall option to uninstall APE without needing to restart in single user mode to do it manually.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

I'm interested to hear if anyone is experiencing slowdowns
on a standard Macbook with 1GB memory.

A friend at work installed Leopard on his Macbook and is
telling me he feels the Internet seems slower to him now,
which makes me think the OS is taxing his memory and that
the Mac is processing pages more slower.

I wanted to recommend Leopard to another person at work
also with a 1GB Macbook, but want to hear other experiences
before doing so.

 

[Joe Casey]

I did a clean install on a core 2 duo black Macbook with 2 gig of ram. If anything, everything seems a little quicker. Have them check System Memory in the Activity Monitor (in the Utilities folder). As I type, with Firefox, Mail, iTunes, iPhoto, and Activity Monitor running with Spaces (in addition to a host of other processes), I'm using 589 MB of physical memory of which only 328 MB is active.

 

[DaveF]

I don't know the link off hand, but a review noted that Leopard felt snappier with less memory than Tiger -- that is, 1GB did better with 10.5 than with 10.4, and even 512 MB was tolerable.

But, there are so many quirks and variables, that your friend just might have the right configuration that gets a tad pokier with Leopard even though it's faster for most.

 

[DaveF]

Just installed Leopard; a trouble-free affair.

Last night I used SuperDuper! to make a bootable copy of the hard drive and verified it was bootable. That in place, I was ready to go at this morning with the default Upgrade option.

I did the default Leopard install (except for removing 1GB of printer drivers I don't need). I left it running to make breakfast. I returned an hour later and it was done, waiting for me to watch the intro movie and restart to accept the newest updates.

Ten minutes in and all is well. Initial, surface- level impressions, alas, are negative. The translucent menu bar is distraction. I'm not keen on the new side dock; I don't like the current trend to translucent black "HUD" interfaces. Likewise the new system folders: gray on gray? NeXT knew that was the wrong way when they moved from gray scale to color back in '92.

But things are running well so far. Mail had no troubles with my account. Firefox is fine. A quick peek at Stacks suggests a useful tool; albeit hindered by the stupid auto-icon creation method. iTunes is updating my PodCast subscriptions.

So, lets see how this goes. And then, maybe next week, upgrade my wifes dual-G5 machine.

Huzzah! Arrange by Kind in Column View. Worth the $129 for that alone!

A couple more comments, then I'm off to mow the lawn

New Logitech drivers for my MX Revolution work. No troubles at all, and my Tiger settings work in Leopard. I've not looked to see if functionality that didn't work in Tiger has been fixed for Leopard.

Love the Movie listings Dashboard Widget!

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Dave,

Good to see you are up and running.

I am underwhelmed by the Leopard experience. It has a few
nice enhancements under the hood, but other than that, it's nothing
revolutionary. Really, Apple's promos made the OS look far better
in the long run. Still much better than Vista, though.

Leopard is making my Macbook Pro crash. It happens whenever I
put it in sleep mode. Once it is awoken and I go into programs, the
system crashes. I am not too worried about it since I am certain
Apple is going to be working the bugs out of this software very quickly.

 

[Aaron Reynolds]

My wife's 2.0 white MacBook (the old mid-level one with a gig of RAM) is about the same, maybe a bit faster -- the biggest gain is that my crazyquilt wireless network doesn't lock up the Finder anymore when a device drops off of it. Hooray!

But my old dual 867 G4 is a revelation -- it's significantly faster. I was thinking that it was the end of the line for the ol' warhorse, but now I think I can get another year or two out of her. I'm putting iLife and iWork '08 on her next, and we'll see how they run.

I ran into the Logitech upgrade problem -- stupid on my part, it took me until my install had failed to look down at my mouse and see that it was a Logitech. But I did an archive and install (which I should have done in the first place) and migrated my data back to it, and everything is good.

 

[DaveF]

Ron, I sympathize with your underwhelming sense of Leopard -- and bummed to hear your MBP has Leopard problems. I understand Leopard is largely an "infrastructure" change, and the UI changes were mostly modest and in several cases wrong-headed.

Despite the modest visual changes from Tiger, I think Leopard is the "Switcher's" OS. My gut sense a year ago to go Mac with Leopard was correct; just it was delayed four months past my must-buy date .

The Finder is a robust system with good polish added. QuickLook is great. To my amazement, CoverFlow is useful! Spotlight kills; fast enough to be an app launcher. BootCamp is official. And with Parallels and Fusion one-upping each other, switching is ever easier and affordable. And key bugs were fixed: Aaron's comment on the Finder not beach balling is spot on.

Hopefully bug fixes will come out in short order to help the early adopters. And hopefully we can get fixes for the stupid UI changes.