After Bill Scott's and Juergen Bosch's comments about upgrading to
Leopard 10.5, it has been quiet. As I am upgrading some "non-
essential" machines up to 10.5, I just wanted to check if there is
more info out there.
Despite horror stories on the discussion site, upgrading 1 G4 PB, an
Intel MacBook Pro, an Intel MacBook, and an Intel Mac Mini went
without a hitch, either as an upgrade or "archive and install". I
was motivated by the Time Machine option for automatic backups. But
I will be rebuilding one of the machines with CCP4 and other programs
for testing, as well as some NFS disk cross-mounting.
However, as Bill alluded to, X11 in Leopard has some problems (http://
lists.apple.com/archives/X11-users/2007/Oct/msg00065.html) and X11
users are reinstalling the Tiger version (http://aaroniba.net/
articles/x11-leopard.html ). I found that just backing up the /etc/
X11/ directory, the /usr/X11R6 directory, and the Tiger /Applications/
Utilities/X11.app before the installation avoids the problem. Just
edit /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to replace "exec quartz-wm" with "exec /
usr/X11R6/bin/quartz-wm". That worked fine for me, but it does have
the annoying "double X11 icon in Dock" problem mentioned by Ben Byer
in his method of installing both Tiger X11 and Leopard X11 (http://
lists.apple.com/archives/x11-users/2007/Nov/msg00005.html).
One last hint that was really useful is that the installation DVD can
be transferred to a small (20-80 Gb) FireWire disk:
"This is what I did: Used an empty (blank) external FW drive, created
2 partitions (one 10GB the other with the remainder), then using Disk
Utility Restore selected the Leopard install DVD as the source and my
10GB partition as the destination. Be advised this took a while!!
When finished, I selected the 10GB partition as Startup Disk and
installed Leopard from the external FW drive. I have installed
Leopard on two machines using my external FW install disk. I formated
the external FW drive with Apple Partition Map NOT GUID."
On my G4 PowerBook, it only took 20 min to load it onto an ancient
20Gb FW disk, but doing this prevents a major complaint about
upgrading to Leopard: variable readability of the dual-layered
install DVD between machines. People have also complained about the
poor quality of some of the DVDs (scratches, smudges, etc.).
Finally, you don't have to go through the DVD verification every time
you install.
Thanks for any new information,
Michael
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R. Michael Garavito, Ph.D.
Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
513 Biochemistry Bldg.
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1319
Office: (517) 355-9724 Lab: (517) 353-9125
FAX: (517) 353-9334 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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