Got that Cat Updated 14 Nov 2007
13/11/07 23:27
Leopard
Install thoughts Process and a new Apple
Keyboard.
Ok Leopard here I come, to start with I’m typing this using my new thin apple keyboard as it arrived with the copy of Leopard.
I must say I do like the feel of the keyboard and the keys response is perfect, when I tried one at MacExpo Live I knew straight away I’d like one, however the letters and numbers do seem a little offset, it is totally odd and I even had to measure the letters distance from each side of the key, yep you guessed it dead centre, but I’ll swear to my dying day they look offset to the right, weird, still it feels (and looks) great.
Oh and if this is the smell from every Apple product GET ME OUT OF THIS HOSPITAL! It actually smells like the smell you get when you go and give blood, yuk.
Well this was going to be fun, and to make sure that the journey didn’t turn into a disaster I decided to take some precautions.
I had a spare (ish) 80gig HD in a powered enclosure, it had some data on it but I had a more recent backup so I decided to utilise this drive and do a bit of, well for me total experimentation, so I hooked it up to my Mini and used the disk utility to partition the drive into three, one for another instance of a clean Tiger, one for a new Leopard install, and the final one as a backup for my current data used only on the Mac. Now those among you more attentive folk would ask, is it a FireWire drive, ah no it is not, so as I found out I couldn’t then put OS X onto it to boot from. OK so my first lesson, but I did later remember that I’d heard that you couldn’t boot from a USB into OS X, not without some work which I was not wanting to get into. OK I do have a 500 gig FireWire drive that I’m using so I used the 80gig to back up to and decided to repartition the 500 gig FireWire drive so I could boot from that, and as I would want to install both Tiger and Leopard then Windows and Linux later I decided to give it 2 20gig and 3 10 gig partitions leaving the remaining for data.
So I backed up all the data and set to setting up the Partitions named etc etc. What I also intended to do was to out my data back into the 500 gig Drive and UPGRADE to test it as opposed to the nightmares I’ve had when upgrading MS OS’s.
So at 20:52 after backing up everything I hoped, I hard partitioned the 500 gig drive into it's various segments, and I started the install of Tiger to the guess what "Tiger" Partition.
So at 21:15 Tiger asked me to reboot, which I duly did having to stop my game of Zwok I was playing on the Windows machine. It went through it's Tiger welcome screens and hey presto I was asking for the Language and telling the machine NOT to transfer my information, I then logged out before installing any updates and did a restart, and here was my first possible disaster, it went straight back into the install I'd just created. However it was restarting on the Tiger Drive so I went into Sys Preferences and choose my original Mac HD drive to boot into, but not after updating the current install, time now 21:30. At 21:45 I restarted to check the updates on the Tiger Drive I then also put my data back onto the 500 gig drive in the originally named Partition this at first the estimate was 3 hours (argh). Well the copying took over an hour and three quarters phew, although I've got my Zwok score a bit higher lolz. So I restarted but this time back to the original drive on the Mac Mini itself, this took a little longer than normal but nothing to concern about, and then I'm in with no issues, so now I have a getout clause!
But at 11:30 pm I had to make a choice bed or try an install. Well I've posted this you'll have to see tomorrow what I did.
Guess What it's now 1am and I've (well nearly) tamed the little kitty.
So I didn't actually start the install until 11:47pm at 23:50 I was unchecking which Printer drivers however I wasn't able to uncheck some of the languages. I was a little concerned as the install had not asked what type of install was required! At 23:58 Leopard told me 1 hour and 50 mins to completion this changed quite rapidly and at 00:06 only 52 mins to finish. At 00:26 being told only 6 mins left I was starting to get excited, well as excited as you can get when you know you'll not be able to really get stuck in until the following evening! Well at 00:41 with still less than a minute to go it seems that the last little hurdle is taking some time. So at 00:47 I was asked to reboot, hang on I was going to do an upgrade so what happened there then. And on reboot for a minute all I had was a blue screen and my cursor, and I thought well oh damn, then the user screen popped up so I logged in, but it then took another minute or two to get to my desktop and all the Q's ie for time Machine etc. I got into iTunes all looked well, however Mail failed and an error report was sent to Apple. I tried again and I also tried ical that was fine, but as I've said elsewhere NO SIDE BAR COME ON! And in the mean time Mail just kept failing! So for now goodnight.
So I tried MAIL but it wasn't working, I went to work and did a bit of searching on the web sites and came across a forum on the Apple site where people were having the same issue as myself, here
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1223823
which made me think a little about how I had my setup, think the bulb shone brightly, DOH I'd moved my Mail App alias to a Folder called Internet within the Apps Folder, so could that be my problem, well when I got home I moved the Mail App icon to the folder and yep it started up. However all is not completely sorted as when I tried to open Mail about 30 mins later I got the error again, but this time when I had hit the restart button Mail actually did restart. So I'll keep you up to date on what happens on that.
So I've been at home for an hour and my first impressions are that the boot and shut down are slower, by quite a few seconds, and apps seem a little slow loading and swapping but I'm not going to judge yet, I'll leave that until I've let a few of the admin apps have run. Plus I do only have a Mac Mini 1.25 1Gb Ram, so I shouldn't expect too much, or should I?One other thing which is a pain, iTunes has moved the folder back to it's original location on the Mini HD, ell of course I have over 11gig of music and I don't have the real estate on the Mac Mini's internal drive to store that so I reconfirmed the location and argh it's lost all the links boo hoo, guess what yep you've guessed it, I don't have a copy of the original library files!!!
Ok Leopard here I come, to start with I’m typing this using my new thin apple keyboard as it arrived with the copy of Leopard.
I must say I do like the feel of the keyboard and the keys response is perfect, when I tried one at MacExpo Live I knew straight away I’d like one, however the letters and numbers do seem a little offset, it is totally odd and I even had to measure the letters distance from each side of the key, yep you guessed it dead centre, but I’ll swear to my dying day they look offset to the right, weird, still it feels (and looks) great.
Oh and if this is the smell from every Apple product GET ME OUT OF THIS HOSPITAL! It actually smells like the smell you get when you go and give blood, yuk.
Well this was going to be fun, and to make sure that the journey didn’t turn into a disaster I decided to take some precautions.
I had a spare (ish) 80gig HD in a powered enclosure, it had some data on it but I had a more recent backup so I decided to utilise this drive and do a bit of, well for me total experimentation, so I hooked it up to my Mini and used the disk utility to partition the drive into three, one for another instance of a clean Tiger, one for a new Leopard install, and the final one as a backup for my current data used only on the Mac. Now those among you more attentive folk would ask, is it a FireWire drive, ah no it is not, so as I found out I couldn’t then put OS X onto it to boot from. OK so my first lesson, but I did later remember that I’d heard that you couldn’t boot from a USB into OS X, not without some work which I was not wanting to get into. OK I do have a 500 gig FireWire drive that I’m using so I used the 80gig to back up to and decided to repartition the 500 gig FireWire drive so I could boot from that, and as I would want to install both Tiger and Leopard then Windows and Linux later I decided to give it 2 20gig and 3 10 gig partitions leaving the remaining for data.
So I backed up all the data and set to setting up the Partitions named etc etc. What I also intended to do was to out my data back into the 500 gig Drive and UPGRADE to test it as opposed to the nightmares I’ve had when upgrading MS OS’s.
So at 20:52 after backing up everything I hoped, I hard partitioned the 500 gig drive into it's various segments, and I started the install of Tiger to the guess what "Tiger" Partition.
So at 21:15 Tiger asked me to reboot, which I duly did having to stop my game of Zwok I was playing on the Windows machine. It went through it's Tiger welcome screens and hey presto I was asking for the Language and telling the machine NOT to transfer my information, I then logged out before installing any updates and did a restart, and here was my first possible disaster, it went straight back into the install I'd just created. However it was restarting on the Tiger Drive so I went into Sys Preferences and choose my original Mac HD drive to boot into, but not after updating the current install, time now 21:30. At 21:45 I restarted to check the updates on the Tiger Drive I then also put my data back onto the 500 gig drive in the originally named Partition this at first the estimate was 3 hours (argh). Well the copying took over an hour and three quarters phew, although I've got my Zwok score a bit higher lolz. So I restarted but this time back to the original drive on the Mac Mini itself, this took a little longer than normal but nothing to concern about, and then I'm in with no issues, so now I have a getout clause!
But at 11:30 pm I had to make a choice bed or try an install. Well I've posted this you'll have to see tomorrow what I did.
Guess What it's now 1am and I've (well nearly) tamed the little kitty.
So I didn't actually start the install until 11:47pm at 23:50 I was unchecking which Printer drivers however I wasn't able to uncheck some of the languages. I was a little concerned as the install had not asked what type of install was required! At 23:58 Leopard told me 1 hour and 50 mins to completion this changed quite rapidly and at 00:06 only 52 mins to finish. At 00:26 being told only 6 mins left I was starting to get excited, well as excited as you can get when you know you'll not be able to really get stuck in until the following evening! Well at 00:41 with still less than a minute to go it seems that the last little hurdle is taking some time. So at 00:47 I was asked to reboot, hang on I was going to do an upgrade so what happened there then. And on reboot for a minute all I had was a blue screen and my cursor, and I thought well oh damn, then the user screen popped up so I logged in, but it then took another minute or two to get to my desktop and all the Q's ie for time Machine etc. I got into iTunes all looked well, however Mail failed and an error report was sent to Apple. I tried again and I also tried ical that was fine, but as I've said elsewhere NO SIDE BAR COME ON! And in the mean time Mail just kept failing! So for now goodnight.
So I tried MAIL but it wasn't working, I went to work and did a bit of searching on the web sites and came across a forum on the Apple site where people were having the same issue as myself, here
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1223823
which made me think a little about how I had my setup, think the bulb shone brightly, DOH I'd moved my Mail App alias to a Folder called Internet within the Apps Folder, so could that be my problem, well when I got home I moved the Mail App icon to the folder and yep it started up. However all is not completely sorted as when I tried to open Mail about 30 mins later I got the error again, but this time when I had hit the restart button Mail actually did restart. So I'll keep you up to date on what happens on that.
So I've been at home for an hour and my first impressions are that the boot and shut down are slower, by quite a few seconds, and apps seem a little slow loading and swapping but I'm not going to judge yet, I'll leave that until I've let a few of the admin apps have run. Plus I do only have a Mac Mini 1.25 1Gb Ram, so I shouldn't expect too much, or should I?One other thing which is a pain, iTunes has moved the folder back to it's original location on the Mini HD, ell of course I have over 11gig of music and I don't have the real estate on the Mac Mini's internal drive to store that so I reconfirmed the location and argh it's lost all the links boo hoo, guess what yep you've guessed it, I don't have a copy of the original library files!!!
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