Did the Leopard upgrade almost a week ago, and it's now running relatively smoothly. Most of the basic operations and the bootup in particular seem noticeably faster than with Tiger 10.4.10. While my white Intel iMac has thus far avoided a lot of the major installation glitches reported on this and other sites, the installation process had its own share of drama.
Upgrade Preparation
In preparation for the upgrade, I mirrored the internal drive to a USB external using RsyncX, deep cleaned the caches using IceClean, and repaired the disk permissions. Overall, the installation process went smoothly -- after the LONG process of verifying the DVD, the installer did an Archive and Install, and the machine rebooted like it should have.
Immediate Aftermath
But, once the iMac rebooted, numerous dialog boxes popped up at the same time:
- Software Update found 3 updates (GarageBand, Keychain/Login 1.0 update, and Apple Remote Desktop 3.2 update)
- Time Machine found an external drive and wanted to know if I wanted to enable it
I cancelled out of the Time Machine dialog, and said yes to the Software Update dialog. But, then the iMac immediately asked if I wanted to reboot, and I clicked yes even though I wasn't sure if the updates had finished downloading. The machine rebooted, but it turns out that the updates were never installed. So, I ran the Software Update again, and those 3 updates did not show up this time. (I would later download and install them manually from Apple's site)
Saved by Time Machine
Afterwards, I spent some time exploring the OS. It was a bit slow at first, but that was because Spotlight was indexing the internal and external drives. Once that was done and I saw that things were running switfly and relatively smoothly, I decided to start up Time Machine. It took about 2 hours to backup 140GB of data, and during that time I left the machine alone.
Once the TM back was done, I did some more exploring. All was well until I tried logging into my wife's account for the first time. The iMac locked up at that point and upon rebooting all I got was a blank screen. Checking the main drive using Disk Utility, it said that the file system was unreadable and could not be repaired. I'd previously restored a corrupted file system using Tech Tool (which comes with the Applecare disc), but this time that was not an option because Tech Tool has not been tested with Leopard.
So that left me with restoring the entire drive using the Time Machine backup I'd just created. Booting up from the Leopard DVD, the process was straight forward and again took close to 2 hours. But, once the drive was restored, everything was back to normal.
Ongoing Issues
Like I said at the beginning, Leopard so far has mostly run smoothly with no major problems (i.e., blue screens, kernel panics, etc.), and in general the OS seems to run basic operations quicker. But, I have observed some other ongoing issues that hopefully future updates will resolve:
- Disk Utility sucks: repairing disk permissions takes forever, and cannot repair certain issues with Apple Remote Desktop; plus the drive info window does not fully display
- Finder still sucks: Some things have improved (like the cover flow view and a network search that no longer locks up the system if it can't find anything), but Finder is still a mess to navigate and will occasionally go into the spinning beachball and try one's patience (should I reboot or wait a few more minutes?)
- random beachballs: Most of the time when the system freezes, it just require patience, but a couple of times I couldn't do anything and had to reboot.
Given that aside from those occasional glitches Leopard is running smoothly for the most part, I wonder if the problems encountered are contingent on the which Mac people are using. I read a lot about problems with the aluminum iMacs, and the MacBooks. Are these problems with Leopard concentrated on some specific models, or is it just hit and miss depending on how people customize their Macs and the software installed.
Upgrade Preparation
In preparation for the upgrade, I mirrored the internal drive to a USB external using RsyncX, deep cleaned the caches using IceClean, and repaired the disk permissions. Overall, the installation process went smoothly -- after the LONG process of verifying the DVD, the installer did an Archive and Install, and the machine rebooted like it should have.
Immediate Aftermath
But, once the iMac rebooted, numerous dialog boxes popped up at the same time:
- Software Update found 3 updates (GarageBand, Keychain/Login 1.0 update, and Apple Remote Desktop 3.2 update)
- Time Machine found an external drive and wanted to know if I wanted to enable it
I cancelled out of the Time Machine dialog, and said yes to the Software Update dialog. But, then the iMac immediately asked if I wanted to reboot, and I clicked yes even though I wasn't sure if the updates had finished downloading. The machine rebooted, but it turns out that the updates were never installed. So, I ran the Software Update again, and those 3 updates did not show up this time. (I would later download and install them manually from Apple's site)
Saved by Time Machine
Afterwards, I spent some time exploring the OS. It was a bit slow at first, but that was because Spotlight was indexing the internal and external drives. Once that was done and I saw that things were running switfly and relatively smoothly, I decided to start up Time Machine. It took about 2 hours to backup 140GB of data, and during that time I left the machine alone.
Once the TM back was done, I did some more exploring. All was well until I tried logging into my wife's account for the first time. The iMac locked up at that point and upon rebooting all I got was a blank screen. Checking the main drive using Disk Utility, it said that the file system was unreadable and could not be repaired. I'd previously restored a corrupted file system using Tech Tool (which comes with the Applecare disc), but this time that was not an option because Tech Tool has not been tested with Leopard.
So that left me with restoring the entire drive using the Time Machine backup I'd just created. Booting up from the Leopard DVD, the process was straight forward and again took close to 2 hours. But, once the drive was restored, everything was back to normal.
Ongoing Issues
Like I said at the beginning, Leopard so far has mostly run smoothly with no major problems (i.e., blue screens, kernel panics, etc.), and in general the OS seems to run basic operations quicker. But, I have observed some other ongoing issues that hopefully future updates will resolve:
- Disk Utility sucks: repairing disk permissions takes forever, and cannot repair certain issues with Apple Remote Desktop; plus the drive info window does not fully display
- Finder still sucks: Some things have improved (like the cover flow view and a network search that no longer locks up the system if it can't find anything), but Finder is still a mess to navigate and will occasionally go into the spinning beachball and try one's patience (should I reboot or wait a few more minutes?)
- random beachballs: Most of the time when the system freezes, it just require patience, but a couple of times I couldn't do anything and had to reboot.
Given that aside from those occasional glitches Leopard is running smoothly for the most part, I wonder if the problems encountered are contingent on the which Mac people are using. I read a lot about problems with the aluminum iMacs, and the MacBooks. Are these problems with Leopard concentrated on some specific models, or is it just hit and miss depending on how people customize their Macs and the software installed.