Okay, so I installed Leopard, and so far…

I’m up and running on Leopard. I’d say I’m 95-98% absolutely thrilled with it.

Did my three backups (two bootable), thought I’d do the archive and install. And then…

Some Leopard early adopters bitten by installation bugs:

Unfortunately, there’s more. Some users have reported that they are unable to select a drive at the onset of the installation process. At the screen where they would normally be able to select a drive to install, users are instead faced with… nothing. One solution that has proven to work has been to head into Disk Utility and simply wait for the partition to appear. Once that happens, you can proceed with the installation.

The installer wouldn’t recognize the laptop drive. I finally booted off of one of the bootable spare drives and brought up the disk utility; the partition wasn’t unmountable because a file was reported as open and busy. I finally fixed it by throwing everything in the trash and seeing what wouldn’t delete. It was late, and I forgot to write it down, but it was a file in the System folder, nested somewhere down in the bowels of the system. rebooting after that fixed things, and I erased the disk and then booted back to the installer and everything went fine.

Nice to know it’s not just me. No idea why it happened, though. Other than that? it all went well.

Except, well, Aperture lost its serial number. Of all the freaking applications that should know better…. Hey, Photoshop didn’t…

I had one system freeze immediately after the install when I tried to change the airport setting, but I haven’t seen it again afetr a reboot. and tonight coming home, I plugged it into external monitor, and when it woke up, it looks like it got confused about which monitor to use (lid was down), and I ended up with all of the files on the desktop visible but not touchable. that required a restart, it didn’t fix itself after a sleep. And I’ve seen one instance of a cursor getting into a funny state — but purely cosmetic.

Other than that? I mostly like almost everything. Except the damn menu bar. Whoever thought making it translucent needs to be shot. Fortunately, someone else is pissed, and so..

Leopard Fix: Solidify your translucent menubar at LifeClever Tips for Design and Life:

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m finding Leopard’s new menubar more irritating than Fox News after a natural disaster. The mix of translucent bar with solid text and icons makes it an illigible mess.

Fortunately, there’s OpaqueMenuBar. Just launch the app and your menubar returns to its full solid glory.

Frankly? I don’t mind the Dock at all, unlike some, but we’ll give that some time to get used to see how it goes.

Everything seems faster. I’m not seeing any real problems. Aperture at first glance seems MUCH faster. Ad here’s an intersting thing. I just fired it up, selected all of my photos, and deleted the previews (will explain later), and quit the program, and while it’s updating the database, the icon in the finder view is flashing for the Aperture Library. As if they’ve animated that the item is being updated for you.

cute.

ASll in all, very good. Couple of glitches, the disk issue is worrisome because it’s not something easily worked around by non-geeks. But beyond that? so far, soo good, and Time Machine is doing the backup right now…

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