Leopard Archive and Install

Update: If you’re just tuning in, I did a deliberate upgrade on my least-used Mac after backing up everything. Do not do the same. And yes, my main machine is still running Tiger, and will keep doing so until 10.5.1 pops up.

Although I’m feeling a bit under the weather (besides other stuff, I’m definitely getting a sore throat), here’s a minor update on the Leopard upgrade notes I posted Saturday.

The many suggestions for the usual voodoo like resetting the PRAM and resetting the SMU were well meant and I thank those who sent them in, but they had nothing to do with my situation – it had to be an incompatible kernel extension of some sort.

After noticing that I could reboot just fine (with no hangs) from the login window and getting a pretty nasty crash while unplugging my PowerMate, I tried to completely remove it – but ended up instead in the dreaded “reboot loop” where the machine will keep looping to a blue screen.

I expect Griffin to come up with an update soon(ish). This has happened before when I upgraded to Tiger, and it took them more than a few weeks to fix it.

So I decided to do things properly and reinstall, using “Archive and Install”. Which means that although all my applications (like Quicksilver) work OK, I’m finally rid of crud like the Cisco VPN driver (which I very seldom used).

I was actually surprised that Mira still worked, and am now going through the motions of reinstalling developer tools and MacPorts.

Which reminds me: It took a while to get Mercurial to build, but not because not all ports in MacPorts are yet to be updated – most of them compile just fine.

The problem I had was that there is actually a hard-coded reference to python2.4 in the build script. And since python2.4 was the only port that I couldn’t install so far, that forced me to just go and get the source and install it with the spanking new Python 2.5 that is now built-in to Leopard – although I would much prefer having this fixed in MacPorts to save me the trouble of going around installing one-offs.

I suppose I’ll file a bug on that port later in the week. That and MacPorts failing to detect the built-in awk when compiling ncursesw.

Update: If you’re upgrading to Mercurial 0.9.5 and have hooks on a remote server, make sure you disable any output like so:

$ cat .hg/hgrc 
[hooks]
changegroup = hg update > /dev/null 2>&1

Otherise, 0.9.5 will complain loudly when pushing changes over SSH to the remote box.

Finally, the Portuguese localization (something I got quite a bit of questions about) wasn’t installed by default – it was hidden away in the installer preferences, which sort of makes sense considering I was upgrading a machine where it didn’t exist previously and is used exclusively in English.

But it is available if you do an “Archive and Install”. After activating it, it is blissfully free of the usual Brazilian terminology that has made me use Macs exclusively in English for the past sixteen years, and I consider it just about perfect. I have, however, switched back to English for the time being (after a brief stint in Chinese just to confirm that I have yet much to learn), for the sake of habit.

Guess what, I can’t print. The Leopard built-in GutenPrint drivers can’t make head nor tail of my HP PSC 950. I will try fiddling with them a bit more later in the week, and if everything fails I’ll try reinstalling HP’s ancient 2005 drivers (which were working prior to doing the “Archive and Install”).

Feel free to share your own notes or ask questions in the comments.

A last-minute update, courtesy of Faisal Jawdat: If youcreate an alias to a folder and then drag the alias into the dock, the dock doesn’t use it as a stack. You don’t get the old menu behavior, but you don’t get the ugly stacks either.