Matter where (country) OS is purchased?

[bohemka]

This is a dupe post (didn't think it belonged in the licensing sticky).

A language/OS/functionality question regarding the region of purchase:

My hard drive on my G4 15" alu PB just crapped out and I'm about to replace it at the Apple certified tech down the street... in Germany. I was running 10.3.9, so I thought this would be a good time to clean install Leopard on the new drive, and maybe even include iLife and iWork (the mac box set... which is about 25% off here until the 31st... is it also at a discount now in the states?).

Am I going to run into problems installing an OS and aps purchased in Germany? Should I be ordering this from the states?

Thanks for the help.

 

[gnasher729]

This is a dupe post (didn't think it belonged in the licensing sticky).

A language/OS/functionality question regarding the region of purchase:

My hard drive on my G4 15" alu PB just crapped out and I'm about to replace it at the Apple certified tech down the street... in Germany. I was running 10.3.9, so I thought this would be a good time to clean install Leopard on the new drive, and maybe even include iLife and iWork (the mac box set... which is about 25% off here until the 31st... is it also at a discount now in the states?).

Am I going to run into problems installing an OS and aps purchased in Germany? Should I be ordering this from the states?

Thanks for the help.

The operating system is absolutely identical all over the world, and so are the Apple applications. If you borrowed a Mac from a German who had set it up for his use, you would just go to System Preferences / International, then order languages in order of your preference, then possibly choose how things are sorted and so on, and the next time you login the Finder is changed; apps change when they are restarted.

 

[bohemka]

Thanks, gnasher. That's what I thought, but I wanted to check before I had them install all that stuff only to not be able to understand it. I use a German-oriented PC at work and it's a pain.

 

[macrem]

Apple nailed the most usable and advanced software globalization experience in the industry. As gnasher mentioned, just drag your language to the top of a list... Wow, class! Apple recommends logging back in, but I find its not quite necessary to do that. Just force quit Finder, relaunch any already opened apps you want to display in the newly chosen UI language and voilà.

Windows users who are skillful enough to get the resource files needed are in for rebooting the system after each language switch, which apart from the downtime may impact other users in lasting and bizarre ways. For instance, I recall switching to Japanese for one user, consequently all users on that system saw the yen symbol instead of the backslashes "\" representing directories, e.g., C:¥Program Files¥Adobe¥Acrobat¥acroread.exe (or whatever)

Other flavors of *NIX generally do a good job. The user community contributes a lot to Linux. I imagine a lot of the translations in Gnome, for instance, are done or edited by pros like Sun Microsystems as Sun contributes to Gnome, OpenOffice and various other open source projects. Distros like Ubuntu are also delivering improvements to projects like Gnome.

Microsoft uses good quality translators but the underlying technology in Windows needs a major overhaul.