Snow Leopard upgrade notes (UPDATED)
I upgraded yesterday. Here’s what happened…
The MacBook Pro was a Tiger install upgraded to Leopard. I deactivated and removed Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2, and Acrobat 7 as I knew they wouldn’t run afterward (and really ran kind of lame beforehand too). I had 51.77 GB on the drive, which I then backed up with Carbon Copy Cloner to an external drive. Immediately post-install I had 64.99 GB of drive space. I don’t know how much of that pickup is attributable to the base 10 change, but 13 gigs is quite a difference. I think it probably had more to do with cleaning up the two previous installs.
I lost quite a few apps, but by choice. Anything that required Rosetta was deleted, and I don’t think the machine is any worse for wear. After cleanup I was sitting on just over 70GB of free space. There were some [geeky] quirks too:
- Little Snitch still runs, but when messing with settings System Preferences reverts to 32-bit mode.
- I had to re-pair the Nokia with the computer, bluetooth-wise. My AT&T service still isn’t any better.
- MySQL ceased operation, and I believe it had something to do with symlinks from the startup module. I upgraded to 5.1.39, the 64-bit version, and all is good again. I also ran Marc Liyanage’s script for removing MySQL, and it found an old version 4 lying around. It never harmed anything before (I was previously running like 5.1.10), but freeing up even more drive space was a blessing in disguise.
- Home grown OpenSSL certificates got wiped out. Now I get to follow my own instructions for re-creation. I found this out when Apache wouldn’t start, and thought it strange that the upgrade would delete the certs while the httpd.conf file was left untouched.
- GD is included in the PHP build, which is now 5.3.0. No need to plug that in anymore.
- mcrypt was not included in the new PHP build. And that problem has already been solved.
- My hosts file doesn’t seem to work anymore. Still haven’t figured out what the issue is there.
It was a sum total six or so hours of work. Still well worth the hassles, as I picked up roughly 18GB of drive space and the machine is now noticeable snappier.
MG signing off (while keeping his fingers crossed he didn’t overlook anything)
UPDATE: Also, I’ve taken to GIMP as the go-to photo editing tool, at least until I work up the courage to plunk down the dough for CS4 (or is that CS5). The universal binary, version 2.6.7 for Leopard, works just fine here.
Posted in Office
| Tags: operating system, OS X, Snow Leopard, upgrade
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September 24th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Gives me the heebie-jeebies everytime I upgrade – like playing Russian Roulette. I think I’m going to wait this
one out for a bit until they’ve had some more time to work out any kinks (at least 6 months to a year).
Working with multimedia, I lost a lot of production time when a few of my heavy-hitters (Lightwave, Electric Image,
FCP) took a sabbatical on me after I upgraded.
Love the ‘keeping your fingers crossed’ comment. No kidding!
September 25th, 2009 at 10:03 am
This whole Intel transition has dragged out too long, and I think that is part of the reason each upgrade is so painful. Thankfully, this one didn’t do too bad, and most of what I lost was fairly useless anyway. The exception was the Adobe line, but I probably should have upgraded from CS2 a while ago anyway.
December 3rd, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Your mcrypt article (http://michaelgracie.com/2009/09/23/plugging-mcrypt-into-php-on-mac-os-x-snow-leopard-10.6.1/) is missing, and that’s what I’d dearly love to find. Trying to install mcrypt on Snow Leopard is a pain!
December 3rd, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Sorry Amgine…should be back now. (hopefully you subscribed to this comment thread, and will get a notification momentarily)
December 4th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Great! Thanks Michael Gracie! will hopefully have a chance to do this over the weekend.