Syzdekistan

About a week ago, I bought the newest Mac system software, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. This a pretty big update with a lot of new features and a lot of behind the scenes technological improvements. I run a pretty stock system, so I wasn’t too worried about upgrade problems but I made sure I had a current backup.

I didn’t buy the upgrade until Sunday night. Besides, if there were real huge problems with the update, I would have seen reports of problems on MacFixIt. By the time I got around starting the installation process, it was 10:00 P.M. on Sunday night. The install took a total of about 70 minutes on my MacBook Pro. I did had some minor Keychain problems which I halfway expected to have. This was a bug that already had a fix so I wasn’t too worried. This bug a caused a new empty keychain to be created on my first use of the new operating system, so the fix was installed after I had the problem. This resulted in the computer asking for passwords for each secure website that I visited and each time I initiated a wireless connection. Finally, when I rebooted, my user account was (temporarily) missing. Apple had a technical bulletin with a fix for this problem. It only affected users with passwords of 8 or more characters who created their user account with Mac OS 10.2. It was a little scary not to see my account when logging in the second time (especially at midnight on a Sunday night), but the fix was easy. It involved booting into Single User mode and typing some commands in. It wasn’t a big deal but was a little annoying to have to deal with that so late at night.

The rest of the week, I had some wireless access issues. My connection here at home can be a little flakey and I get a lot of interference from the neighbors at times. However, I soon realized that this was a more serious issue. Wireless would work well for a while, then I would totally lose connectivity. The signal strength stayed high but I couldn’t get online. Thinking it was interference, I changed the wireless channel but that didn’t help. If I unplugged the cable modem, it would work again for a while. Most strange, was that my other computers also lost connectivity. I suspected it was a router problem so I removed one of the Airport Express units (I use two for coverage throughout the house). I turned off WDS, I changed ethernet cables from the cable modem to the Airport, and even changed the encryption. Finally, I noticed a MacFixIt report that some people were having a variety of wireless problem including problems similar to mine. Their solution was to change the base station channel from Automatic to a discrete channel. I had already done that. In fact, to help alleviate interference with my four neighbors with wireless, I have had a channel set for a long time and I changed the channel at the beginning at the troubleshooting. Still, it was worth a shot to try it again. This time I completely reset the Airport Express base station. Then I changed the channel from Automatic to channel 1. Success! I have had flawless wireless access since then.

I was a bit surprised to see any problems with Leopard at all, but the they weren’t too bad. I always upgrade using an “archive and install” mode which gives you a pretty clean install. I also know that Apple works fast to come up with fixes for problems and the online Mac community is great about posting help for problems. MacFixIt is a fantastic site for Mac troubleshooting and I read everything they post on the site. When I did IT work, I used to carry the Ted Landau’s great OS 9 troubleshooting book, Sad Macs, Bombs, and other Disasters with me and I really enjoy reading his site.

As for the upgrade, I really like it. My 18 month old MacBook Pro feels like a new computer. It is snappy and fast. The Finder is much improved and very speedy in opening windows and lists. I was surprised to really like the Coverflow interface for viewing files. It’s great to see the file contents and makes cleaning out the download folder fast and fun. Plus, being able to quickly view the contents of most documents by just hitting the spacebar and then paging though a document without taking the time to open it is great. The new print dialogs are nice and adding and sharing printers is very easy.

I love the new backup system, Time Machine. It has a very cool backend and the user interface is very innovative. It makes backup extremely easy and actually fun. Check out this very cool chapter on how Time Machine works from a very thorough review in Ars Technica on Leopard.

Besides having a few problems with the update, I think Apple hit this one out of the park. You won’t see buyers of new Macs clamoring downgrades of 10.4 to be installed on their new machines like many Windows users clamoring for XP instead of Vista on their new PCs. Apple sold over 2 million copies of Leopard so far and it is a groundbreaking piece of software. I’m having a lot of fun with it.

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