Leopard installation
Today’s the day Apple’s new operating system, codenamed “Leopard” is released. I’m not going to go into the gory details of the installation since I’m sure I won’t be writing about anything anyone’s not seen. Instead, I’ll be writing about what I find, things that maybe some people won’t know about.
I’m installing Leopard on its own hard drive simply because I’m afraid that the drivers I need for my M-Audio Firewire Solo amp won’t work, and without them I have no mic and with no mic, no podcast.The installation’s being done MacPro 2x2GHz Core 2 Duo.
October 26, 2007 6:20pm
I pick up Leopard at the Apple store in Menlo Park, NJ. Very fast service. Only medium sized shirts though 
9:00pm
The partition I want to use won’t work because I have to use Disk Utility and mark the whole drive as “GUID Partition Table”.
11:55pm
Finally backed everything up. Split the HD into two partitions for Leopard and whatever I can use later. Rebooted and installing Leopard.
October 27, 2007 12:27am
Installation done, reboot. Intro movie with no audio from my speakers.
I decided to transfer all I can from my Tiger partition: account, network settings, apps, documents.
1:45am
Transfer’s done!
1:47am
Leopard is up and FAST! It found my server immediately. All my files and apps are here.
Important note: Tiger would boot faster than it took to bring up its own network. Because of that, at random times I wouldn’t get my server share because there was no network connection at the time Tiger was booting. Now I’m guaranteed to get it at launch!
1:53am
Poking around at apps like iChat, Entourage, Twitteriffic, Skype. All work. My sound problem was Leopard picking my Firewire Solo output by default. Bad, Leopard, BAD!
Software Updates are available. Skipping for now.
iTunes works and found all my music and podcasts.
2:03am
Not digging the flat blue slate folders.
2:03am
I just noticed that the time was off and Leopard was not set to automatically get the time, so my clock was off by 7 minutes. Fixed.Safari works fine and remembered all my passwords.
2:07am
Safari isn’t getting along with WordPress. I started this post on my Macbook Pro and had no problems. With Leopard’s Safari, it wasn’t keeping the formatting of the page properly. Carriage returns were ignored and my text is Times when it should be Verdana. Moving to Firefox helped a little, but it’s not perfect.
2:10am
A friend of mine asked if folders worked in the dock now. They do and don’t. The dock is split into two parts: the left side holds the apps, the right side holds the folders. You can’t put a folder anywhere like you could before. Now you have to put it on the right side.
When you put a folder in the dock, you have three options: view as fan, grid, or automatic. Automatic will go to grid if you have too many items for a fan view. Clicking the folder will open it as the selected format. If you want to open it with the Finder, right-click on it and select “Open”.
2:13am
GarageBand tells me there’s a 4.1 update and I ignore it. It’s now hanging.
Force-quit it, relaunch. Now it’s OK, but the Firewire Solo amp from M-Audio doesn’t work (as expected).
Turns out the M-Audio software does see my audio input.
2:20am
Updated Garageband to 4.1. Taking forever to initialize. Should I pass out now? Force-quitting and restarting the app isn’t working. Going to reboot. See you on the flip side.
2:29am
Reboot and GarageBand relaunch successful!
2:41am
Still poking around to make sure everything works. I want to try Back to my Mac but I can’t at the moment.
2:44am
You can still put folders in the sidebar.
I can use Time Machine on a different partition of the same disk where Leopard boots from, but Apple asks if I really want to do that. Good point.
Printing to my Canon i950 works.
2:57am
I noticed that when you copy your settings from another hard drive, you don’t get the new apps that Apple would normally put into the dock. Spaces is not there. I had almost forgotten about it.
3:05
Bed. Late.
10:50
Back at it. Trying coverflow on my wallpapers folder. It’s amazingly fast and much more handy than anything the OS had built-in before. Some pictures load faster than others which means I have to wait a bit, but it’s still better than before.
Trying to move stuff around so that I can try out Time Machine.
I noticed the popup menus in Leopard are rounded. That’s good because I was tired of cutting myself.
Trying to change my Downloads folder to point to a hard drive without using symbolic links.
11:04am
The Downloads folder is where apps can store files downloaded from the internet. You can change this location in Safari, for example, but you can’t say “Downloads points to here” using the OS. Maybe there’s a defaults command for it.
11:16
Can’t use BootCamp until I upgrade my firmware.
11:40
For some reason, I couldn’t update my firmware using Leopard so I had to revert to Tiger to do it. I’d get the flashing lights on the MacPro, the long beep, and the firmware update status bar would only show for a split second and then the Mac would reboot. Anyway, I’m upgraded and I can use BootCamp but I have to do even more data swapping on my hard drives for it to work. I’ll do that later.
11:57am
Taking a break to rearrange my hard drives again. Posting this and will continue later.
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So does the Firewire Solo work in garage band? Or is it just “seen”?
Thanks in advance.