Woohoo! I have officially upgraded to Panther. I got my copy this morning – along with a complimentary T-shirt! – and managed to save a hundred bucks courtesy of the educational discount. (Shh!) The upgrade itself went much more smoothly than I expected. I cleared off the iPod and used it to back up the stuff I wanted to keep: applications, documents, bookmarks, my iPhoto library, mailboxes, etc. Then I reformatted the drive and did a clean install from scratch (removing the partitions I set up last time). The install process probably took twenty minutes from start to finish. Then it was just a lot of busy work – setting up accounts, importing the old stuff off the iPod, etc. I think it’s all done except for downloading the latest Gimp release.
Initial impressions: Things definitely seem zippier. Not a lot, but I didn’t think OS X ran very slow on my machine before. I’m loving the new Exposé thing; I’ve got a hot corner set on the upper-right that clears the desktop. Very useful. Snooky and I tried the fast user switching which works just fine, but as I don’t have Quartz Extreme we couldn’t see the ultra-cool rotating cube effect. The Font Book is pretty sweet; I’m hoping that I’ll have access to the system fonts once I get the Gimp going. (We couldn’t get ’em to work before but I had a dodgy installation, I think.) So far I’ve had two applications break after the upgrade: Kung-Tunes and icWord. Everything else seems to be working okay. Oh, and I got rid of Classic! No more OS9; I’ve taken the leap. (I never used it much anyway.) More updates to follow once I’ve played around some more…
robert
October 25, 2003 — 8:39 pm
i think i’m still about a month away from the upgrade. on a side note, can it wipe over all your documents? sad to say, i don’t have a cd drive or disk drive to back anything to….
Kris
October 25, 2003 — 9:30 pm
There’s definitely an option to just upgrade your existing OS. That should preserve the documents in your home directory, I’d think. I just went with a clean install figuring that I needed to do some spring cleaning on the machine anyway. You should definitely try to figure out some way to back things up though, just to be safe. Sad to say, but I had a major crash last year while trying to upgrade to 10.1.5. Lost *everything*. Always anticipate the worst!
Kris
October 25, 2003 — 9:34 pm
Wait… You’ll be going from OS 9 to 10.3, right? You should definitely back everything up then, as you’ll probably have to do a clean install anyway. Do you know anybody with an iPod or a disk burner you could borrow? Or you could always try transferring the stuff over a network (either to somebody else’s computer or to some space on the Internet).
robert
October 26, 2003 — 6:47 pm
oh, scary. i’ll have to investigate. thanks kris!
Dan
October 27, 2003 — 2:24 am
Backing up is a good idea. Installing OS X over OS 9 isn’t so much a problem–they don’t overwrite each other or anything. You shouldn’t have to reformat your drive. OS 9 will just sort of ignore OS X and OS X will try to use OS 9 for Classic. The thing with the backups is just that installing an OS is a critical time where the likelihood of catastrophic failure jumps (from .001% to .1 % or something thereabouts). So having a basic backup is just a good solid idea.
Moire
November 6, 2003 — 10:57 am
Bad news, Kris! Beware!
http://macdiscussion.com/article_show.php3?article_id_var=249
http://www.macintouch.com/panfirewire.html
I’m SO glad I didn’t upgrade yet! All of my work is saved on a FW drive to keep the built-in drive’s memory freed up for scratch disk purposes. I think I’d die it something like the above happened to me.
Kris
November 6, 2003 — 11:57 am
Yeah, I’ve been seeing mention of that. Luckily I don’t have one so I’m safe. So far Panther’s been pretty damn good for me. (My favorite feature, I’m ashamed to admit, is the ability to have my desktop change every hour to a different photo from our holiday.) I did curse it a bit last night though as the Snook and I struggled to get the Gimp up and running, but we got there in the end.
Anonymous
November 15, 2003 — 10:39 am
Jaguar also had the ability to switch desktops as often as you like
Kris
November 15, 2003 — 12:55 pm
Yeah, but it didn’t make it easy to use photos from your iPhoto library. You had to locate them by hand or separate them out into a special folder. With Panther, my albums just appear as an option.