Changing cats

As I probably told in my earlier posts, MacBook is not the only one Mac in my household. Actually, it is not even the first Apple computer, but third - after two (almost) identical Minis.

Yesterday, I visited my local Apple dealer and upgraded my 3 years old Mini (that's first Intel-based Mini model), putting 2 GB of RAM instead of 1GB I had on board from the beginning. But besides the hardware upgrade, I also decided to get latest software titles, so I bought a Mac Box Set, which includes Leopard, iLife '09 and iWork '09.



Coming back to my place, I did a full backup of Tiger partition to external hard drive to ease my paranoia, and in the evening I was ready to fire Leopard install. This was the first experience of installing Mac OS for me, because before, I always bought a new computer with OS coming pre-installed. To be honest, installation (at least upgrade from Tiger to Leopard) is pretty boring comparing to Windows install. The latter tells stories about OS features - at least something changes on screen, but the former shows just giant letter X and a progress bar.

In less than hour, (which felt much longer,) I was greeted by already familiar Leopard screen with nebula on the background and a new shiny Dock. I finally disabled PathFinder application from automatic starting up on login, and started checking old applications for functioning. Here where we got some surprises.

At first, Upgrade to Leopard broke Mail application. It shown a folder structure, but not a singe mail message. Fortunately, the first URL returned by Google about how to fix this problem was very helpful. It seemed that during OS upgrade, Mail received some strange defaults that prevented him to display information correctly. After cleaning up bad defaults, Mail prompted for importing old mailboxes, and after 2 attempts and ca 40 minutes, all 10 thousand messages were in place.

Next failed application was NeoOffice (native port of OpenOffice for Mac). when asked to open some DOC file, it loaded up himself, but then did not want to do anything. Trying to open the same document by choosing Open from File menu also did not have any effect. To cure this, I put old version of NeoOffice to Trash and got a new version off the web. After that, document became loadable, but few minutes later I inserted a CD with iWorks and hopefully this will make me forget about OpenOffice, either native or X-version of it, whatsoever.

Upgrading an OS was also a good reason to give a boot to software titles that were rarely or never used, as well as downloading new versions of "good" programs. FireFox 3.5, newest Google Earth. There were no newer Picasa, and the old one is still crashing as badly on Leopard as it did on Tiger. But well, I have hopes on iPhoto '09 which will get installed later today.

Safari 4.0 needed OS X 10.5.7, while Leopard that comes in Mac Box Set has version number 10.5.6. So I could install it after running Software Update and rebooting.