Wednesday, 7 November 2007

Leopard Installs Not Always Problem Free

After the customary until-you-cant-take-it-anymore 30-minute waiting period, I installed 10.5 Leopard on the Mac mini that serves my local network.

The mini isn’t my primary work machine, and it’s regular duties are fairly straight forward: transport backups, be invisible.

As such, the upgrade was quick and straight-forward (but I wasn’t really paying attention, I was working while all this was going on). After restarting the it was back. I poked around a little, started investigating CalendarServer and decided that the spit-and-polish on the UI would in fact make me more productive1 so I started the upgrade on my primary workstation.

This was a bad idea.

After the intial upgrade, one of the handful of third-party PreferencePanes or Startup Items sent the Finder into an infinite loop of crash and relaunch and crash and relaunch repeat until hard restart.

Two re-upgrades later, I determined it wasn’t bad installs, and firewire-moded into trash anything that may be interfering with the Startup process2.

While this process gave me Leopard, I’m still recovering days later. Not yet back to where I was in Tiger.

The archive+install ate my /local directory, so I needed to re-install svn and mysql (thankfully I left myself a reminder). The ruby mysql gem needed to be recompiled and I’v lost my VPN configuration. All of which were running just fine previously.

There are 3 more Macs in the house scheduled for upgrades. None of which I’m prepared to dedicate the same amount of time on as my primary machine. Yes, I’m gun shy.

1. There’s a Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field for you.
2. M-Audio, Wacom, and Tivo are all suspects.