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Monday, November 12, 2007

A Leopard Upgrade Story

I haven't been having the easiest time with my Leopard upgrade.

After my first attempt to upgrade, I got the dreaded "blue screen hang" on startup. This afflicts some number of systems, where after the install, all you get is a blue screen. After a couple of tries, I did a clean install and that worked better. Fortunately, I didn't follow Ben Galbraith's advice and "pull the switch", and I'm so glad a made a complete backup first!

I imported my settings from my backup and the vast majority of things just worked, including applications (/Application and ~/Applications) and most settings. Not my printer, though.

I'm still trying to figure out how to get svnserve up and running again, which is no fun, as I had just figured it out for Tiger. I'm getting a permissions problem accessing the files as user _svn (Leopoard puts an underscore in front of all system or daemon user ids and groups). I don't understand exactly why.

Other fun ... I decided to move to Mail.app from Thunderbird, since Mail.app can import Thunderbird mailboxes. For some reason, it only imported my older mail, so I have to keep Thunderbird around to access all my mail from 2007. 2006 and earlier imported. I don't get it!

Eclipse has become unstable for me. That's no fun, it's been getting memory access violations and crashing hard. So, this is a new chance to try IntelliJ. I'm already like some things, but I've also already hit a couple of bugs and the shear wealth of options and terminology is overwhelming.

I haven't tried out Time Machine yet, I may give it a whirl tonight.

I'm starting to adjust to using Spaces and have closed up my Mac's screen; with multiple desktops, it's just simpler (and better for my posture) to use a single screen. I may have to get a camera for iChat.

I immediately moved the Dock to the right side of the screen, to turn off the awful, stupid, distracting look they introduced.

Leopard includes the svn suite by default (I'm not sure if Tiger did); using MacPorts to install Hugs and erlang was easy, but ghc is a mess because of something that's changed between tiger and leopard. But who has time to study anything new when they're busy trying to finish Tapestry (and learn IntelliJ)?

10 comments:

Wayland Chan said...

So you use Macports? I can't figure out what the difference is between that and fink. Is one preferred over the other?

Unknown said...

I was promised that MacPorts was better supported and more likely to include pre-compiled artifacts. I'm not sure that's the case.

Bill Holloway said...

I'm experiencing the Eclipse crashes too, and am ready to make the switch to IntelliJ. I liked your working in Eclipse initially because all your comments about the platform immediately became documentation anyone could use because anyone can afford Eclipse. But I've been impressed with the tools in IntelliJ for some other reasons (mostly web service support), and am probably switching myself...as soon as I can a Jetty module plugged in.

yole said...

If you're running Leopard, we strongly recommend you to get IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.2 EAP from http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/IDEADEV/Selena+EAP

It contains quite a few of Leopard specific fixes and improvements.

Massimo said...

If Europa or what other Eclipse version sucks on Leopard go to the source... use FreeBSD.
BTW i'm sorry Howard but you will suffer a lot for moving to IntelliJ :)

Howie said...

"I immediately moved the Dock to the right side of the screen, to turn off the awful, stupid, distracting look they introduced."

Come on, stop denying your NeXT heritage: the dock belongs on the right side of the screen. :P

I haven't upgraded to 10.5 just yet but would appreciate a follow-up about 10.5.1 which should be seeding shortly.

Mike Desjardins said...

I just upgraded, too. You're in for a disappointment if you expect Time Machine to work with drives connected wirelessly (e.g., via Airport Extreme). I hope they fix it in 10.5.1.

It sounds like you didn't have a Linux partition on your Mac - be thankful. That caused all kinds of problems for me.

Mikey Reppy said...

Did you figure out the svnserve issue? I was planning on setting up an in-house svn server on a mac mini this afternoon and was googling around to figure out if there were any issues. There was a mention of svn and firewall issues on securosis.com: http://securosis.com/2007/11/01/investigating-the-leopard-firewall/ (alex nov 3 post), which might be relevant, although it seems doubtful for a connection to the server on your own machine

Unknown said...

I found a guide to installing SVN access via HTTPd. I only made it as far as http:// access (as opposed to https:// access), but so far, so good.

Mikey Reppy said...

Aha, thanks. I had also perused that guide and had filed it away as a backup. http only access will be fine for me as this machine won't be public but I was curious about fiddling with the ssl setup to get my teeth wet in that direction.