Mark Gilbert’s Blog

At the end of October I wrote a little bit about my experience with Leopard, and the little problem I managed to make for myself by not backing up data before an install. I also promised a more detailed look at Leopard itself rather than just my problems with it. Someone pointed out to me last week that I had yet to do the follow up, so here it is.

Personally I think Leopard is ahead of Tiger in most respects. Things are better organised and in a more logical fashion, for example, firewall settings now come under the ‘Security’ section of the preferences, rather than ‘Sharing’ as they did in Tiger. Parental controls now have their own section, rather than being hidden away in the accounts settings.

The look of the OS has changed too, the menu bar is now semi-transparent, rather than the older opaque style of Tiger, and the same applies to the Dock, it is now semi-transparent and reflective. No just shiny reflective but real-time reflective. Nice features both of them, but they serve no real purpose other then iCandy.

The bigger features include the much anticipated Time Machine, Boot Camp, and Spaces.

Time Machine automatically backs up everything on your Mac by default to an external hard drive of your choosing. It can be either USB or Firewire and does not have to be present all the time, obviously Time Machine will only back up to there when the drive is connected. You can specify which files are excluded from the backup so that pointless files are not wasting backup space. The whole process is absolutely seamless, it really is a case of set and forget. Running quietly in the background files are copied, with the oldest backup being erased once the drive gets full. Backups are done hourly and are incremental once the first full backup has run. All this leads to a solution which is much more likely to be used by the average user, which can only be a good thing. Your machine can be completely restored from a Time Machine backup with the help of the Leopard install disc, complete with permissions intact.

Spaces is Apple’s implementation of virtual desktops. The number of spaces can be configured right up to a 4 x 4 grid of them down to the simple 2 spaces. Moving between them is simple enough, control and arrow keys move you around, or click the spaces icon to see an expose-esque overview of all spaces and click the one you want to switch too. Applications can be bound to a specific space so that each time you open that application it runs in a particular space, which is a nice touch.

Boot Camp, everybody knows what it is by now, so I’ll not go into that. What I will say is that it is included with Leopard and no longer available for standalone download. It remains essentially the same as the downloadable version, but with an updated driver set and some minor bug fixes.

The interface for Front Row has seen a revamp, with the large reflective spinning thing gone, and a new, rather more minimal interface in it’s place. Personally I like it, it ties in nicely with the Apple TV interface and makes navigation easier. Some people don’t like the new design and have even reverted back to the FrontRow build that comes with Tiger, but for me, I’m sticking with it.

Printing has been massively simplified, adding my networked printer really was a doddle, I had no problems at all with all the required drivers installed automatically for me.

There have been a whole host of UNIX changes under the hood which I wont go into here, and security has been revamped, again I wont go into that here, but have a read to find out what changes have been made.

Sadly since upgrading to Leopard I have seen more crashes. Application crashes in Safari in particular I’m seeing more frequently than with Tiger, but the 10.5.1 update seems to have fixed most of these.

I’ve had only minor problem with application compatibility, and nothing like the problem users of Windows Vista have been experiencing.

All in all it’s a most worthwhile upgrade for users of Panther and Tiger, and Apple’s attractive pricing on their family packs makes the purchase very tempting for users with more than one Mac in their house.

Cheers

Well as I expected I bought Leopard on launch day. I was wanting to go away with my other half somewhere for the weekend, so Birmingham seemed like a good choice. So at 17:30 I was in a large queue outside the Apple store in the Bullring. Time went by and the Queue which I thought was big as it was, got even larger, about double the size it was when I joined.18:00 rolled round and the doors opened, and people were let in in small groups, maybe 50 at a time. I was in there earlier so I just went in, bought the family pack for £129 and got out, besides I had a table booked for dinner at 21:00.

So we got back to the hotel and I had some time, so I decided I would have a go at installing it on Kay’s laptop.  You have to understand I was quite excited at this point, being the little boy inside that I am, and I broke two golden rules. These rules are “always backup” and “repair your disk before attempting an upgrade”.Things did not go well, I ran the installer, used the disk utility to do a permissions repair but not a disk repair, chose an upgrade install and the installer stopped with an error before getting anywhere. So I rebooted and was going to Google the problem, but the chimes came, as did the Apple logo and the spinning gear, then the unit powered off. Tried again, same thing. “Shit, Kay had all her first year Uni work on there” was the thought that went through my head. I booted off the Leopard disc again and ran disc utility, tried a disk repair and it failed with an error in the catalogue file.The install would now only give me the option of erase and install, instead of archive and install and upgrade. I could not erase the drive, I hadn’t backed anything up and erasing the drive and installing a new OS would make chances of data recovery small. I had to get the laptop up and running again with no data loss, losing everything was not an option. So I tried a safe boot, nothing from that, ran fsck from the terminal on the installer disc, and still nothing. Finally I knew I would have to wait till I got home, put the laptop into target disk mode and copy the data off using my iMac.

So when we got home I put the laptop into target disk mode and plugged it into my iMac, but the disk didn’t mount. It showed up in disk utility as being available but the partition couldn’t be mounted. My only hope at this point was to try something hardcore. If the disk was appearing as a volume but wouldn’t mount I could still perform tasks on it to try to fix it. Disk Warrior was my weapon of choice and after a lot of thinking and grinding disk warrior managed to have a go at repairing the volume. To my relief Disk Warrior repaired the drive and when I turned the laptop back on it booted into Tiger. At this point I backed up the main user folder and tried again with another upgrade install. This time the install went through as normal and after a little while the unit rebooted back into Leopard.

With mine I made no such mistakes again, all data backed up and an erase and install option, after an upgrade gave problems with software I already had installed under Tiger. So I sit here typing this from Safari 3.04, not the beta with my lovely Leopard OS. It is very nice, the user interface is much more consistent than with Tiger, Time Machine makes backups easy and really is a set and forget backup solution. Spaces makes organising your desktop easy, complete updates of many applications such as Safari, Mail, Front Row, and others. Have a look at the full 300 changes at Apple’s website. Well, I’m pleased with Leopard and it was worth the wait, I’ll give a more full view after a few weeks.

Cheers

Apple have now officially confirmed Leopard will ship on October 26th at 18:00. I presume that will be Pacific time making the launch time 11:00 in the UK if they stick to the same schedule. The UK Apple site simply states October as the release date and doesn’t go into specifics. There’s time yet to get all the details out though, I’m sure we’ll know soon enough, and as usual I’ll post it here.

Cheers

I already posted about the fact that Leopard would hit sometime at the end of October, but now there is some serious momentum to this rumour. Both ifoAppleStore and ThinkSecret have had some confirmation from their sources  that October 26th will indeed be Leopard release date. Apparently a 18:00 launch looks likely as Apple did previously for Tiger. Roll on the 26th when Apple can finally let the cat out of the bag.

Cheers

According to ThinkSecret Apple OS X 10.5, known to most as Leopard could drop sometime in the week beginning 22nd October. As usual sources are not disclosed as I’m sure people may lose their jobs over the leak, but they seem fairly sure. So all being well all us Mac users should have a new kitty cat to play with by the end of the month.

Cheers

According to Apple, their new Leopard OS will feature the ability to safe sleep your OS X session when switching to Boot Camp, then when you come back from Windows your OS X session is restored to where you left off. Hardly earth moving but cool non-the-less. It’s a feature I would use, I hate having to end my OS X session when I switch back to Windows to play any games.

Cheers