Apple ® section

Preparing for Leopard

I pre-ordered Leopard months ago, but although apparently people who ordered it just recently had it delivered today, my order hasn't even shipped yet.. oh well.. I watched the Apple video that shows some of the new Leopard features and of course that just made me even more anxious to have it.

The video also convinced me that I probably do want Time Machine. At first I felt that I wouldn't bother - I have a 250GB external drive here, but I use it for my own storage needs, and apparently Time Machine would really prefer to have its own exclusive space, so I was just going to not use it and forget about it. That Apple video changed my mind, so now I have a small problem: stop using this drive for overflow storage, or buy another drive.

Yeah, guess what won that argument. I ordered a 500GB USB drive for Time Machine.

But then that makes another problem: too many darn USB devices. So another trip to the Internet store to buy a USB hub. Sheesh: this upgrade is getting pricier by the minute.

And then I really screwed up.

I figured I wouldn't have any upgrade issues with a not even two year old MacBook Pro, but just in case I went to check the requirements and noticed that it wants 9GB of free disk. If you've paid attention at all, you might remember that I just talked about buying a 500GB drive, the USB I have now is 250GB, and of course the MacBook Pro came with an 80GB drive. What's 9GB?

Yeah. Well, my brain suddenly slipped into last century and paniced. I did a "df" and saw this:

Filesystem              512-blocks      Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2             155629664 110636560  44481104    71%    /
 

Omigod I only have 4GB free!

Yeah, yeah, I know: more like 20GB. But as I said, my brain was somewhere in the 90's when 4GB drives were pretty hot stuff, and it told me that this 15GB drive was nearly full.. yes, I know it's not a 15GB drive. I know that in 2007, but as I said, my brain was living a decade or more in the past.

So I started deleting stuff, and that's when I really paniced, because I threw away a half gig folder and did a "df" again and.. I still only had 4.4GB free.. so I threw out another 3/4 GB of stuff, and it still hardly changed and now I was getting scared..

Well, fortunately for some reason I then did a "df -k" and groaned, muttered "idiot!" a few times and realized all was actually fine.

So now I'm ready. Really ready. Right? If and when they ship, that is. And if that 500GB drive gets here before Leopard. And if I'm not tied up with something else..

7 comments

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Mon Oct 29 15:39:29 2007:   TonyLawrence


Omigod.. Did you know that Apple put Sun's Dtrace into Leopard? And not just
"put it in", but put a gui interface on top of it?

I picked that up reading http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars which
I am barely getting started with - fantastic, in-depth review (as usual, Ars Technica seldom
disappoints).



Tue Oct 30 12:58:51 2007:   TonyLawrence


This http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2007/osx-tiger-vs-vista-vs-ubuntu-security-a-15-point-report-card/

"report card" contrasts Tiger, Vista and Ubuntu. You may not agree with the scores,
but it's a decent comparisons of features. Of course Leopard improves on these.



Wed Oct 31 11:20:00 2007:   TonyLawrence


PC Magazine's review of the new Mac OS ended with this

Leopard again raises the question of whether to switch from Windows to a Mac. I've found Vista to be a major disappointment that tends to look worse the more I use it. I still use Windows XP for getting serious work done. But OS X is easier to manage and maintain and I vastly prefer OS X to Windows for Web-browsing, mail, and especially for any task that involves graphics, music, or video. Leopard performs all such tasks even better than previous versions did—and Leopard is the only OS on the planet that works effortlessly and intuitively in today's world of networked computers and peripherals. Leopard is far from perfect, but it's better than any alternative, and it's getting harder and harder to find good reasons to use anything else.

( http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2207556,00.asp for full review )



Thu Nov 1 21:30:37 2007:   drag



Some people are reporting that Leopard is not disabling access to certain services that you tell it to. I don't know what all that is about, but it's worth looking into:
http://www.heise-security.co.uk/articles/98120





Fri Nov 2 02:16:57 2007:   TonyLawrence


No, that's not the case. The Slashdot comments explain the confusion.



Fri Nov 2 08:29:12 2007:   drag


Ah.

I try to avoid the comments on slashdot as much as possible.



Fri Nov 2 11:16:39 2007:   TonyLawrence



I try to avoid the comments on slashdot as much as possible.

Can't argue with that :-)

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