So, after much deliberation, I have installed Leopard. So far, I am quite encouraged. It “feels” a little zippier. It looks a little better (Apple has been slowly re-vamping the look since at least the release of Panther, and it’s finally beginning to look consistent again.)
This is the ongoing checklist of things I need working under Leopard (Mac OS/X 10.5) and the list of steps of taken to meet it.
Things that must work:
– Gimp a post about some X11 tricks and Gimp and a thread about inkscape, X11, and GImp, and one on fixing the Gimp
– Parallels/VPN (curr build 3214/June 21, 2007) recommended build is (nonexistent?) 3224, uninstall, upgrade to leopard, reinstall.
– Boot Camp
– X11 article on recovering Tiger X11 in Leopard one on problems with X11 in Leopard a thread on keyboard problems in X11
– UTF-8 in Terminal (i.e. MacPorts)
– Tiger /bin/cp failed on some large files, does it work for Leopard?
– Firefox
– MS Office (an article about fixing Office Icons in Leopard)
– VNC Client (builtin support in Leopard and Jolly’s Fast VNC freware.
– Emacs
– Vim
– MacPorts
– Adium
– GPGMail
– NFS
Things that must work eventually:
– ClamXav
– Keyspan / MacTNC
– MPEG Streamclip
– iMovie PiP plugins
– Scanner stuffs
– iStumbler
– ffmpegX
– EFax Messenger
– Documents to Go
– Missing Sync
– Lyx
– Yacas
– NeoOffice
– Audacity
– Celestia
– Plucker
– VNC server
Steps:
- Backup Tiger Boot Disk with SuperDuper
- Upgrade Leopard
- Reboot
- Login, changing keyboard to US-Unicode
- Enable Spaces, 2 rows of 3
- Turn off Spotlight on external disks.
- Quit Setup Assistant because it was hanging on registration.
- Turn of Secure Virtual Memory
- Try, in vain, to change the desktop background.
- Install Parallels 2.5.
- Install XCode.
- Turn off the .Mac Sync icon in the menubar.
- Wait for Time Machine backup to finish so I can reboot and see if my desktop backgrounds will work.
- Reboot and find that yes, backgrounds now work.
- Test Gimp. Find X11 lacking. Download Gimp-app and X11 from here.
- Test Parallels, it worked after re-plugging in the usb key for the VPN.
- check the office icons post above. it turns out the icons are diff in leopard because they show a preview of the document with the type text (DOC, PPT, XLS, etc) superimposed. i’ll keep the preview i don’t need the super-prettified goofy official microsoft icons that badly and the only way to turn it off is to turn off Finder preview for ALL icons.
- Add the printer back in (wi-fi) and make it default. I’m a little curious as to why this was not brought forward in the upgrade.
- Install Heirarchical Dock so that some of my (larger) docked folders (“stacks”) work the way they did under Tiger.
- Enable VNC sharing in Preferences->Sharing->Screen Sharing
- Update NFS exports list on my server because for some reason Leopard is requesting something different for /home/user than Tiger and Panther did. So no, instead of just exporting /home like I have done for years and years, I must export individual user directories. This is very strange.
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