Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard

Anyone tried this out yet?
I'm thinking of upgrading - I find 10.4 difficult to organise things with and I end up with a very cluttered desktop. apparently leopard has some nifty new tools for organising files

I'm performing a full back up as we speak I'm hoping to have it installed before going to bed tonight.

In all honesty though, if you end up with a cluttered desktop (a common Mac thing I've noticed) I don't know how Leopard will help you.

My colleague upgraded earlier this evening and he said it went fine. Took about an hour though.

They have introduced thingies called stacks - where a bunch of files are lumped into one icon - when you put your mouse on the icon it fans out - sounds really cool and just like something i need to be more organised. they also have multiple desktops i.e. you can have different desktops for different tasks which again sounds good for me. I think I will invest.

http://www.apple.com/ie/macosx/guidedtour/large.html

I ordered this morning. I also end up with the messy desktop from hell so hoping it can help perhaps. Although ultimately the stuff just needs tidying up by me really!

I use SuperDuper to back up to external firewire disks. This is great as they are then bootable desks.

Read a review about the new backup Time Machine function in Leopard and actually am NOT convinced it will be the better option. We shall see. But new toys are always good.

iPhone released in 2 weeks as well :-)

Watched the video demo for Time Machine - it looks amazing.

iphone - blah, not a fan. its too big and frankly i think its kinda ugly. I love my Sony Ericcson k800i - best phone ever - except for the fact that its currently off getting fixed

Still can't see spending what, 100 Eur for something which is basically a Service pack.. 300 Fixes/Changes oooooo, not worth the $ in my book.
Don't even get me started on the iPhone... Apple just added more restrictions in the US for people looking to buy it..

A fun tip: Add your applications folder to the doc, then you can simply click it, and all the applications are laid out for you on a stack

Not all the reviews are good: Leopard - What a mess.

Although I think that guy is a bit of an attention whore so it wouldn't surprise me if he'd only written that to drive visitors to his site.

So, what would make you shell out 100 on a new OS? tbh I think you get good value for money with Leopard. 300 new features is quite a substantial amount

If you're just looking at screenshots of stacks it might be hard to understand what they're about, but use them and it's obvious. The point is that they are very quick and efficient to use.

And he's wrong about the resource-hogging - all the eye candy is done by the GPU. If your GPU can't handle it it's turned off. It has negligible effect on processing power for other tasks.

The folder icons are terrible though.

From Malcolm Spud's link.


Probably not the most neutral reviewer around

I can think of a few other OS's that are free and are the same or just as good as OSX

OpenDarwin (The Free version of OSX that runs on Non-Mac hardware, from which Apple got lots of OSS Community contributions, then killed the program. They essentially took alot of OSS/Opendarwin code, put it in OSX and closed the project, all for free, all from OSS developers)
*BSD
Ubuntu

Leopard, is still OSX. Its only a point release from .4 to .5 it may ad some new features and programs, but its basicaly a roll-up
of all patches released since 10.4 + some new features. The same could be said for Windows XP SP2, and it was even free.

While I agree that OSX is a good OS, charging people 100+ Eur for a servicepack is just wrong...

Dreaded Blue Screen of Death mars some Leopard installs

Darwin, which is the open source version of Mac OS X is still running. You can download the source code from here. Apple have open-sourced other projects such as WebKit - this is what Nokia used to develop a web browser for their phones. I never saw the point of OpenDarwin, which was an off-shoot, but it isn't a one-way street.

The BSODs you mention are caused by Haxies, which are hacks. Here's Apple's take:

Upgrade rule No. 1
WAIT.
Bugs will be sorted out, but why be the one to experience them?

Man's right. Never be in a hurry to be the first. Look at all those muppets that jumped for MS Vista.

MS Vista is an operating system?

I never said it was. Microsoft claimed it was. We even made our software work with it, but haven't sold a single copy to a Vista user (if there are any left).

And may I add the old wisdom: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

My MacOS X Pussycat is still working beautifully.

Vista is the MS equivalent of a rash on your todger. An itch that won't go away and fidling with it just makes it worse.

x39 motherboard, with DD3 plus, water-cooled over-clocking with Vista. Devastating. (Build it yourself, it is fun and so simple that I can do it.) Which means that most people can do it too. (or somebody from New Zealand (maybe)

You shouldn't need to have such highend hardware to run an OS.. Vista is a super resource hog.

ARGH!

I bought Leopard and i just stuck it into the drive and the drive has shat itself - its not recognising the disk and i can't eject it!!!
wtf?

help!

Reboot while holding down the mouse button. It'll spit out the disk.

didn't work - does it matter that i'm on a macbook pro?
the disk is spinning all right it just doesn't do anything and stops after a while
any other ideas?

Tried ejecting it using Disk Utility? It shouldn't matter that it's a MacBook. Other than that, no idea.

nothing working - the OX doesn't seem to be properly recongising the drive. now that i think of it i wasn't able to burn dvd's before - i just thought it was me being stupid but now i reckno it was some problem - my superdrive is not so super i expect.
fuck shit fuck shit fuck shit bugger
i don't need to be dealing with this crap now

I read somewhere that the old MacBook Pros would not support Leopard. Mine is certainly too old - G4 Powerbook.

G4 Macs (iMacs, PowerBooks, iBooks & towers) can run Leopard as long as they are 867 MHz or above. All Intel Macs and G5s will run it.

This worked on the G4 PBs, Panther/Tiger, might work for your MBP.

1. Restart the computer.
2. Immediately after the startup sound, press and hold the key combination Command-Option-O-F.
Note: The Command key has the Apple icon on it.
3. Release the keys when you see a white screen that says "Welcome to Open Firmware."
4. At the prompt, type: eject cd
5. Press Return, then wait a few seconds. The disc drive should eject any disc that is present, and "ok" appears behind your command when the action is complete.
6. Type: mac-boot
7. Press Return.

yeah none of that stuff is working
i was talking to the support guy in the library here and apparently alot of people are having this problem with the macbooks and it probably means a new drive
well I'm glad i went for the three year extended warranty!!

Have you got OS X installed on an external firewire drive? If you do, you could try re-booting from that (sys prefs, startup disk) and ejecting.

If your desktop tends to get messy, just configure your webbrowsers to save downloads to a folder other than Desktop and then drag this folder to your Dock. (That seems to be all what Stacks are about in Leopard.)

Where abouts did you get those swish folder icons from?

I think I got them from InterfaceLIFT.

They explain how to change icons in their FAQ.

Wow... Front Row has taken a major step back in terms of "entrance" Nothing was cooler than seeing the icons sweep in after hitting the button on the remote... bring it back!

I like that logic. By that reasoning, the upgrade from Windows 98 from 95 is... (98-95)/.1 = 30X the upgrade of Leopard!


Ars Technica disagrees with you...

For those interested in internals: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review

Another point of interest, for those who are curious:

Time Machine simply makes a separate folder on an external drive, so you are still able to use it for other things as well.

Time machine is 'wicked cool'. It alone almost makes the upgrade worth it.

I was concerned that on the G4 systems that Leopard will not work well, but from everything I've read it seems to actually be snappier than Tiger. You have to love the way that Apple's OS's actually speed up with each release, making my old machine work faster and faster, MS could learn a lot.

True, but keep in mind a lot of the optomizations went into making the OS faster on the new Intel Chips. It still might be faster for you, but just a fair warning. On my (Macbook) I do notice it is faster... especially spotlight. It now works as an excellent application launcher: Just hit command space, and start typing the app name, then enter... perfect for less frequently used apps.

I also think the Cover Flow feature in finder looks fantastic to - means you can navigate files just like you navigate albums in itunes. you don't need to open the file to examine the contents - fantastic! have the reson i ahve a messy desktop is cos it takes so much time to open apps and examine every file when the names are non-sensical (as happens with a lot of downloaded reference articles which i have a lot of)

Got a hooky copy off usenet, installed without a hitch via an external usb drive set up in system prefences to load as master boot drive, takes about 1 hour, no serial keys or other crap to do.
First impressions pretty slick, thankfully they fixed the finder annoying habit of not keeping the view options the same between windows.
Really like spaces remembers me of using good old unix machine, cool for keeping stuff clear and sorted especially on small macbook pro screen.
The VNC screen sharing option is cool, very easy to set up and great for controlling other macs remotely.
All in all a worthy upgrade but glad it was free. lol the hardware costs enough anyway, not like apple is short a few $$$.
iWork 08 and iLife 08 are also great I have to say.

First blue screens now this:


- Link

I believe this issue has largely been solved: The users had a 3rd party OS hack installed. (by Unsanity I believe)

O yeah I had forgotten that old unix thing. I knew it seemed oddly familiar. Since OSX is basically a version of linux anywho i'm sure that was an easy upgrade! Yup another featrue that appealed to me.
As regards paying for the upgrade. The reason oi am happy to pay is for support reasons. i pretty much assume any computer or software i buy these days will break at some point. so i will pay for support. that being said i hope installing the upgrade won't kill my hooky copy of Office!


Blue screens ??

Actually the 'blue screens' are hangs at the first window, which is blue. The Mac OS X equivalent of a blue screen (errors caused by hardware or drivers) is a kernel panic. These haven't been reported by upgraders.

Correct. I have heard of installations going into an infininte loop... which people call, in slang, 'blue screen'... but the reasons for this were addressed in my earlier post.