Yesterday I took the plunge and flattened my MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo, 2.33GHz, 2G RAM) to reinstall Leopard. This was not an upgrade, this was a completely fresh install. It all went pretty OK really – nothing to write home about and certainly no disasters.
I can now quite happily report that out of all the applications installed the following seem to work without a hitch: Zend, Firefox, Adium, Azureus, Vienna, MS Word 2004, MS Excel 2004, Logic Express 7.2, MySQL 5.1, Mulberry Mail, Nokia iSync profile (for our new E65s).
The two apps which have little niggly problems that I’ve found are:
- VLC (media player), which occasionally has problems resizing the aperture and hiding the transport bar as a result.
- Parallels 3, which seems to ‘forget’ the bridging interface if you shut off the wireless interface.
I should note if you are a LAMP developer that the system comes preinstalled with php5.2 – I haven’t had to grab anything from Macports yet.
The annoyances of the transparent menu bar don’t really show in the backdrop I have, and the menu bar has been fixed with the hack I posted earlier this week. Additionally macosxhints.com had a nice hint on removing the stripes from Finder’s list mode, which were getting on my nerves.
Oh, while we’re on the subject of transparency, most of the presets in Terminal.app have a semi-transparent background. This can be changed in the ‘background color’ config section, the opacity option is hidden away in there. Took me 20 minutes to find that one.
Altogether so far an almost seamless upgrade. Tomorrow I try it in anger, and curse the missing wireless profiles I forgot to copy over 😛
November 5, 2007 at 9:06 am
Sounds like waiting for 10.5.1 may not be needed then. Do let us know how you get on at work – if everything goes reasonably well, I think I’ll take the plunge myself.
November 5, 2007 at 10:36 am
Twenty minutes to find the background opacity? 😛 I won’t confess it took me about a minute. 🙂
My biggest niggle so far is a long-standing OS X annoyance rather than a Leopard-specific one: The lack of pointer focus (sloppy focus, FFM, whichever term you prefer). I hate click focus. Christ Apple, even Microsoft OSs let you do it now.