Leopard installation

Ok, so as I mentioned in an earlier post, I decided to experiment a little and just perform an upgrade as opposed to erasing and clean installing Leopard.

I made a full backup of my system earlier in the week using Superduper and also made sure that I had backups of my important files on a separate hard disk too, so I was quite comfortable that I was covered in this respect.

So today before attempting the upgrade, I performed the following actions;

Checked that I had the latest versions of, or compatible versions of what I call "non-apps", i.e. Saft, logmein, Citrix ICA client and various other preference pane items that I have and use.

Btw there are new versions of Saft for Leopard and a beta of the Citrix client (v10) although v7 should be working, at least on intel macs.

After that I ran Onyx and repaired permissions, ran the cron jobs (daily, weekly, monthly) and cleaned out all of the various cache and log files. One reboot later and I was ready to try the upgrade.

The upgrade was almost painless, I dont run any of the uninsanity apps or the logitech mouse controller, so I had no issues with APE (this can cause you to boot up to a blue screen - the quick fix is to update it to the latest version). So for me I simply put the DVD in the drive, started the installer, rebooted the mac and then let it do its thing.

Right after the reboot once the installer had loaded, I was presented with the usual OS X install options, that is to say, the choice of language, whether I wanted to perform an upgrade (default choice) or archive and install and so on. On the next screen I clicked customise and removed all of the extra printers and fonts that I didnt need, then I just let the installation process go.

I didnt time it but Id say the whole process took just under an hour, including the time for verifying the disc, though at the start it did state that it would take 2 hours or more but this dropped to 30 minutes or so quite quickly.

Once completed, it rebooted again and put me right back at my standard login window (albeit with the new Leopard space background). My normal user account and password got me into the system and once in I had my old background and desktop icons just as I had left them.

A couple of things to point out though;

Menucalendarclock needs to be updated to version 3 to be compatible with Leopard
My finder settings were preserved as well, so afterwards I was missing the QuickLook icon in the finder and had to add it using the customize toolbar option.

Besides that the install seems to have worked out well but now I need time to play, test and reconfigure. I'll post some updates here as I find things though.