Thoughts on Installing Leopard

I had two issues while installing Leopard.

The Macbook Pro’s drive was partitioned as an Apple Partition Map, legacy from the G4 Powerbook. Leopard won’t install on APM for Intel systems. I cloned the drive to an external firewire drive, then repartitioned with Disk Utility from the Leopard DVD. It installed the OS, then saw the old OS on the still-attached external drive, and copied over all my settings. Nice.

The Mac Mini was just horrible. It’s an old G4 with no DVD drive, so I had to get an external USB DVD drive. It’d read the disc, but wouldn’t boot. Turns out those old systems will only boot from firewire devices. I pulled the DVD drive apart, and the firewire drive, then connected the DVD drive unit to the firewire-to-ATA controller card. The Mini booted off the Leopard DVD, but then Leopard couldn’t see the Mini’s internal hard disk. After a reboot, it could see the hard disk, but couldn’t see the partitions. I exchanged the USB DVD drive for a firewire model, and the Leopard install worked like a champ.

Mail.app is almost viable as a T-Bird replacement, and its data detection feature is super-nice (mouse over a phone number or address to add that info to the Address Book, or mouse over a date to add an appointment to iCal).

Finder is much nicer, and I like Coverflow more than I thought I would.

I really like Quicklook, but the best thing about it so far is Screen Sharing with connected Macs. I usually use my Mini for playing music, since that’s where my RAID is connected, and my MBP for my main desktop, since it’s a lot faster. Screen Sharing gives me a really easy way to control the Mini, without having to use a KVM. Screen Sharing’s screen updates are fast and useable, and the desktop is dynamically resizeable, which is a big plus over VNC.

Overall, Leopard rocks, and I think Tiger > Leopard is a more significant update than Panther > Tiger.