[Updated] First Look: Installing Mac OS X Leopard
Mac OS X Leopard is here. If you placed a pre-order through the Apple Store, your copy should show up sometime this afternoon, though a handful of lucky people seem to have received their copy late Thursday evening. We’ve covered what you need to know before you install, and how to get your Mac ready. Now here we go with the actual install.
The packaging is considerably more minimal than the last release. The box is roughly the size of a double disc music CD and contains a single installation DVD and a "Welcome to Leopard" booklet. The outer box contains a strange 3-D reflective hologram which looks kind of cool, but doesn’t show up in photographs. You’ll have to take my word for it.
To get started, just pop in the DVD and launch the Leopard installer. Once your computer reboots from the DVD, select a destination and click "Install." A couple of things to note. Initially, my MacBook hung up on the screen that asks you to select an installation destination. I’m not sure if it was just slow or if perhaps my Boot Camp partition was confusing it. Whatever the case, I headed into Disk Utility to repartition the drive. That failed, too. It turns out you need to be on the first screen of the installer in order to use Disk Utility. If you’re any farther along you’ll get an error about the disk being in use.
With a drive wiped clean, the installer had no trouble finding the right volume and offered to proceed with an 11.4 GB install, which is about twice the size I recall Tiger being. Curious, I fired up the custom options and noticed print drivers take up a whopping 3.4 gigs of space. Epson is the worst culprit at 1.5 GB worth of drivers.
Once I whittled down the unnecessary drivers and fonts, I ended up with a 6.3 GB install, which isn’t too bad.
So far, it’s been about 20 minutes and the process says there are about 30 minutes left. I’ll update with some more screenshots as soon as it’s done.
[Update]
In the end, Leopard took about 35 minutes to install. I haven’t added the developer tools yet, but the install was definitely faster than Tiger. The set up screens are about the same — set up a user account, give Apple a bunch of fake personal data, reject pointless .Mac tie-ins and you’re done.
Quick first impressions: Leopard looks very nice. Just browsing my backup of Tiger trying to decide what I need to copy and I’m already addicted to Quick Look — very useful. The icons are more subdued, especially the folders, which I’m not too fond of. But I’m a Quicksilver junkie, so I don’t spend too much time in the Finder. Speaking of which, I hope someone figures out a way to leverage Quick View through Quicksilver.
Hidden Gems: Haven’t had time to find them all of course, but I like that there’s a new option to turn off the Finder warning about changing file extensions, and coders will be happy to see that Leopard ships with Python 2.5, Ruby 1.8 and Perl 5.8, which is much more up-to-date than previous installs. When you download and install a new app, the first time it launches you’ll be asked to OK it. The dialog box now includes the original URL, as well as date and time downloaded, which is nice for reference. I’ll post more gems as I come across them.
Gotchas: Spotlight still slows your Mac to a crawl as it goes through and indexes files. I just dragged over my documents and music folders (about 120 GB) from my backup drive and typing this in Mars Edit puts my fingers about twenty letters ahead of what’s actually showing on the screen. That’s just sad. And I can’t find a way to make Quick Look remember the size of previews. But otherwise, things have gone quite swimmingly.
Here’s some screen porn:
Coverflow is much more useful on the desktop than it ever was in iTunes, especially when combined with Quick Look.
Finder Sidebar options. I’m not so crazy about the new folder icons. They’re harder to recognize in list and column views.
Spaces in action. It works well and you can customize the keyboard shortcuts, but come on. Virtual desktops have been around a while.
The glass dock was the first thing to go. I’m all for eye candy, but that one just doesn’t work for me. I used the tip we posted yesterday to get the dock back to its normal self
Leopard ships with Safari 3, which looked nice and did a fine job of downloading Firefox.
Stacks. Stacks seem to come at the expense of nested folder browsing from the Dock, which I suspect is going to make some people rather unhappy.
[Another Update: For those wondering about specific applications, I haven’t had any problems with anything, though obviously it’s only been two days so I can’t say for sure. Anyway, I can say that Mars Edit 2.0 works without issue, Photoshop CS3 appears to be fine, though I haven’t used it extensively. MySQL seems a bit buggy, but is working — prone to crashing though. Double Command works, Quicksilver is fine (though the Blacktree site seems to be down for some reason), BBEdit is fine, Firefox hasn’t had any issues and Transmission is working great. That’s all I’ve had time to install so far.
One interesting thing to note, NetInfo Manager is gone,some of its former tasks are handled by a new app called Directory Utility, but many aspects of it appear to be available only through the command line tool dscl.]
