Leopard, First Look

Ok, it’s been a few hours since I upgraded to Leopard. The first time it booted after it installed, I got a kernel panic. But it booted the second time. It’s been at 100% CPU usage ever since, installing the XCode stuff (which I always install but never use) and reindexing for Spotlight. That’s colouring a few impressions, because it means Cover Flow, for instance, is very slow. But in brief

  • iScroll doesn’t work. It’s probably what caused the kernel panic on that first boot. I hope there is an update soon, because I like two fingered scrolling.
  • Safari has a really disconcerting and distracting way it gets really dark when you switch to it, and light when you switch away. Some of the other apps do that as well, but Safari gets too dark.
  • Months ago I quite distinctly remember reading that the Airport Express’s external drives would be usable with Time Machine. As a matter of fact, that was a major reason for buying the AE. But now it turns out that AE drives aren’t supported in Time Machine. And considering what a piece of shit the AE turned out to be, I can’t think of any reason not to put it on Craigs List.
  • I was also looking forward to being able to use Mail again. The Tiger version of Mail insisted on indexing and scanning every file in my ~/Mail directory on the IMAP server, which was incredibly time consuming. Every other IMAP client I’ve tried, from Thunderbird to SnapperMail, has the ability to specify that you only subscribe to specific folders instead of all of them. Well, Leopard’s Mail is supposed to have that as well, but when I open up the dialog, no folders are listed there and I can’t find a way to add or remove folder subscriptions. I’ll try again when the CPU isn’t pegged, and maybe it will work right.

I was really looking forward to getting the advantages of Time Machine without having to have a hard disk on my desk, but if that’s what I have to do, that’s what I’ll do. In the mean time, I’m glad that Apple finally came out with Spaces so I don’t need a third party virtual desktop software (actually, I gave up on those ages ago because they kept getting broken by OS updates). And Vicki and I will have to experiment with some of the remote desktop stuff.

5 thoughts on “Leopard, First Look”

  1. When Apple pulls a feature at the last minute like this (backing up to network drives was listed as a feature less than a week ago) I think it’s almost certain that it will be added back in a software update, and sooner rather than later.

    Do you know if you can use two different external drives for two independent Time Machine backups? I don’t trust external hard drives enough to depend on just one for a backup.

  2. Hm. No folders show up for me to subscribe to, either. I know that my IMAP account supports it and this worked for me in the early developer build that Apple handed out when they first announced Leopard.

  3. Bummer on the lack of Time Machine support for network drives – I guess the NAS I bought a while back has just dropped in usefulness under Leopard.

    Our MacBook spends far too much time wandering around the house to even consider plugging in the NAS via USB to make it usable on a regular basis.

  4. Supposedly backing up to AFP shares works, while SMB doesn’t. So far, I’m about 4 hours into my personal Leopard install saga, with 0 machines actually running it yet, so I can’t actually test it.

  5. Also backing up to an iSCSI drive works fine, if you have a server that can be an iSCSI target (Linux, Solaris, probably others).

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