[OS X] Impressions of Leopard

[Val Schmidt]

I've been compiling a long list of impressions of OS-X 10.5 (Leopard).  
I thought it'd be a nice time to share them. This is kind of stream-of- 
conscience.

-Val

-------
I just finished installed 10.5 leopard along with a hard drive upgrade  
on my PowerBook G4. Here are my impressions:

My goal was to upgrade my laptop to get a few more years out of it by  
replacing the hard drive to 160GB (from 100) and upgrade to 10.5. I  
bought the hard drive through our university computer services and did  
the rest myself. [As a side note, although when I purchased the hard  
drive I was sure it was the largest that could be had for a powerbook  
replacement, I now think one can purchase larger drives from  
powerbookmedic.com.]

First backup:
I backed up my user directory to a local network share using rsync.  
The network share was an NTFS file system, which doesn't preserve  
resource forks unique to HFS. I"m not sure how badly this would have  
hurt me. So I also backed up to an HFS formatted portable drive using  
the rsync flag "-eahfs". This flag comes with the version of rsync  
that ships with apple products and provides support for handling  
resource forks.

A better option, imo, would have been to backup (i.e. clone) my entire  
hard drive to the portable drive using something like "carbon copy  
cloner". My portable drive was not quite big enough.

Replacement of the hard drive was completely scary, but actually went  
relatively smoothly a guide provided by the folks at power book medic. http://www.powerbookmedic.com/Take-Apart-Repair-Manuals-p-1-c-258.html

Tools:
Several phillips screwdrivers ranging in size from super small to  
mostly small.
A metric hex wrench 1.5mm
One might need Torx screwdrivers size T-6, and T7 depending on your  
model of laptop.

Things I wish I had:
Proper electrostatic discharge mat
Rubber cement.

Other parts:
Xtrastor EIDE slim profile 2.5" laptop hard drive caddy.

After replacing my hard drive, I booted using the Leopard install DVD  
(hold down the "c"). I formatted my hard drive using Disk Utility and  
then followed the instructions to install 10.5. It goes through a DVD  
and then hard-drive verification process that made me wish I hadn't  
started the whole process at 9 pm.

After the manditory reboot, interactive installation continues. At one  
point you're asked it you'd like to migrate your information from  
another computer. This is the COOLEST thing ever. At this point, I put  
my old hard drive in the hard drive caddy and plugged it into the USB  
port.

What is supposed to happen is your old installation is recognized and  
you have the option of transferring your entire user directory and all  
non-OS specific stuff to the new computer. This didn't actually happen  
for me immediately as my old hard drive was never spun up and mounted  
when plugged into my computer. I troubleshot this into the wee hours  
before going to bed heartbroken and fearing I'd lost everything except  
my backups.

However the next day it became clear to me that the funny dual-headed  
USB cable that came with the drive caddy exists so you can plug into  
both USB ports, as more power is required to operate the drive than  
can be delivered by a single USB port. Since I had simply put my  
computer to sleep when stumped the previous night, I could simply open  
things up, plug the drive into both ports and after a prolonged wait  
the drive was mounted.

The OS-X install on the drive was immediately recognized by my new  
install and I was able to select everything I wanted to transfer  
(everything). It appears that even my fink tree was transferred,  
however it is not clear yet to me how much will be functional.

After the transfer, and the completion of the OS install, I rebooted  
and then started testing things. So far things are going well.  
Powerpoint and Word work, Firefox works,

Stuff that's really cool about Leopard that I don't think you could do  
before:

"Spaces" - apples version of desktop manager. The really cool part is  
you can hit F8 and see all your desktops at once, then expose all of  
them at the same time. You can then select any window and drag it to  
any other desktop. If you shift-click-drag all the windows for that  
application go.

Preview: Preview is much the same, but when viewing photos, you can  
now select a photo in the navigation tool bar and drag/drop it other  
places (an email message for example). You can also select a portion  
of a photo in Preview, cmd-c to copy it and cmd-v to paste only the  
selected portion (into an email for example) These are very helpful  
upgrades imo.

Function keys: On Powerbooks, you can now select in the Keyboard  
System Preferences to unlock the F keys from the hardware adjustments  
so you can actually use them. Hardware adjustments (like volume and  
lighting) can still be adjusted using the 'fn' key with the F-key.

Speed: It may be because my hard drive is now bigger, but I have  
noticed a significant improvement in the speed of my laptop. Even the  
circle "thinking" icon rotates faster (although I wonder if this is a  
clever trick to make me think things are faster). A separate measure  
of this is the time it takes to login to another system using SSH.  
Realizing this is somewhat network dependent, I've tested it on my  
home server, a server at CCOM and one at LDEO. I used to wait several  
seconds (i.e. forever) for public key authentication, not it seems to  
happen instantaneously, although again this is only my perception.

Apple Help: Help used to be a complete mess on my laptop - usually  
bogging my computer down to a crawl. Now it seems to load relatively  
quickly and work quite well. (although still lacking in information,  
imo)

Printers: One shortcoming of Apple's migration tool which helps  
migrate your settings from an old computer/HD to a new one is that all  
the printers configurations are wiped out.

Time: Apple now lists three time servers for NTP - one for Europe, US  
and Asia respectively. Of course, you can only select one and there's  
no place in the GUI to add more. A persistent shortcoming and  
misunderstanding by Apple about how NTP works.

iCal:  Apple FINALLY supports SSL encrypted ical URLs. (https).

Mail: Mail now has Notes and ToDos. I'm not sure yet how I'll use  
Notes, but you can select any piece of text from an email message and  
click "todo" and it'll instantly create an iCal event for which you  
can set an alarm. It has already been terrifically helpful way to keep  
from forgetting to follow up on things and seems pretty easy to use.

Mail also detects a date-time stamp in your email messages and gives a  
drop-down menu when you mouse over it. Options include making a "To  
Do" from the text surrounding the time.

Mail automatically detects addresses and the drop-down list gives the  
option to "show a map" which will bring it up in google maps.

In our mail system, we cannot send messages from outside CCOM through  
our CCOM smtp server. I therefore have to tunnel outgoing mail to  
CCOM. To do this, after I've manually set up the tunnel, I must  
reconfigure Mail to point to the tunnel. If I forget to do this, Mail  
will warn me that my message can't be sent and ask if I'd like to try  
a different configuration. All this works as it always had. However in  
past versions, Mail wouldn't remember my selection for future  
messages. Now however it does. The only thing I wish it could do now  
is create the tunnel for me when I'm not at school.

Finder:  I frequently work on data that's on an smb network share in  
our lab. I often forget to unmount the share at the end of the day. In  
previous versions this would produce a persistent, stale, unusable  
share in Finder. Now when I return the next day, the share is  
remounted automatically without my intervention. Very nice.