10811 With Snow Leopard coming down the pipe today, I thought it would be a good idea to get OS 10.5.8 installed on at least one of my computers while we were still officially in the Leopard era.

I've been getting along quite happily in OS 10.5.6 since last spring on both my unibody MacBook and my 17 inch PowerBook G4, with the only relatively minor hassle being inability to run the final versions of Safari 4, which require a minimum of OS 10.5.7 in Leopard. Safari 4 is running just fine on my Pismo in OS 10.4 .11, but that's another movie.

Anyway, 10.5.6 wasn't giving me much incentive to update, since it's been commendably stable and untroublesome other than continued crappy performance for email throughput compared with OS 10.4 Tiger on similar machines and the same network. Judging from the volume of complaint reports, OS 10.5.7 turned out to be extraordinarily buggy, and I decided I didn't need that sort of grief even potentially unless there was a compelling reason to risk it, and Safari 4 wasn't enough of one.

However, with OS 10.5.8, while there have been some issues reported, they've been a relative trickle compared with 10.5.7, which indicates that this time Apple did a pretty good job of debugging what will almost certainly be the ultimate version of OS 10.5 Leopard and also the last-ever OS X version to support PowerPC Macs like my PowerBook G4, so it's the end of an era as it were. Very much as OS 10.4 .11 has been the ultimate operating system for sub-867 MHz PowerPC machines, OS 10.5.8 will be likewise the definitive OS for the later generation PowerPC Macs for evermore, although just an incremental step in the progress of OS X on the Intel platform.

With Snow Leopard, Apple is shaking the proverbial dust of PowerPC off its feet, and moving forward, which is fine with me, having finally joined the Intel revolution myself. Indeed, a large element of Snow Leopard's raison d'etre has been to strip all the Power PC code out of OS X with the object of speeding it up and slimming it down. However, I fully intend to keep my current PowerPC Macs in service indefinitely into the future — the Pismo running Tiger and the PowerBook G4 with Leopard, which made the latter machine the logical first candidate (and perhaps the only one of mine) on which to install OS 10.5.8. With the arrival of Snow Leopard, I may not bother getting around to installing 10.5.8 on the MacBook at all.

The big PowerBook hasn't gotten a whole lot of hours' usage since I switched to be MacBook for production work last winter, but it's still been used frequently for utility tasks like scanning, photo downloading and editing, and somewhat interchangeably with the heavier-used Pismo for drafting, editing, and Road warrioring. For example, I'm editing this column on it right now in my car outside the public library in Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia while logged on to their wireless broadband hot spot to download iPhoto 8.1, which would be an overnighter on my dialup connection at home.

Anyway, It occurred that I hadn't done a system maintenance sweep for a long time, so I figured it would be prudent to put that in order before proceeding with the OS update. OnyX does a great, no-muss, no-fuss job of this, so I set it on "Automation" to repair permissions, run the cron maintenance scripts, and dump various selected caches as I went about other tasks on the Pismo. OnyX did its stuff, the system was rebooted, and it was time to commence the update. I had downloaded the standalone OS 10.5.8 Combo update installer a couple of weeks ago, so it was ready to go. Being stuck on dial-up, as noted above, (for a few more weeks anyway), using online software update has never been a serious option for me, but my inclination, even if I had the fastest of DSL or cable connections would still be to still use the standalone install updaters by preference. Gives you more control, and I'm also convinced that the Combo version is the way to go even if you're only advancing one fractional version notch, or two, as I was in this instance.

The installer run seemed uneventful at first, but then at the point where the progress bar said four minutes left, things ground to an apparent halt, and stayed that way for a very long time - so long I would have been concerned that the system had hung except I could still hear the hard drive feverishly clicking away in the background, so I knew something was still happening in there, and finally, the progress bar filled in and the installer reported success.

Then there were the obligatory serial reboots, both of which likewise took a perplexingly long time to execute. Presumably, this OS 10.5.8 update (including the 10.5.7 changes as well in this particular instance), really did change a lot of stuff.

The whole process, including the OnyX cleanup, took about an hour and a half on the 1.33 GHz PowerBook G4 with 1.5 GB of RAM. It may have been slowed somewhat by the fact that through the summer I've been keeping the processor speed choked down to Reduced Power (probably about 667 MHz on this machine) in aid of staying below the cooling fan tip-in threshold, which has for the most part worked, and doesn't cause too serious a performance slowdowns for the sort of things I do much of the time with this computer these days.

While I was at it, I also installed the Security Update 2009-004, which only took a couple of minutes to execute, although it did require yet another reboot.

The final touch was to install the Safari 4.0.3 update, and of course one more reboot after that.

So far everything seems to be well; everything's running smoothly, nothing evidently broken, and no problems logging on to the WiFi hotspot with Airport this morning. It's a bit of a milestone since, aside from probable security update patches this will be the last operating system upgrade applied to this computer. As I said, the end of an era.

As for Snow Leopard for the MacBook, I haven't even ordered my copy yet. I'm looking forward to checking it out, but there's lots of time and I'm in no rush. For one thing, there will be the inevitable broken app. issues associated with any major OS version upgrade. Reportedly, with Snow Leopard the collateral damage is low to moderate, but there are some incompatibilities with certain applications -- unfortunately one of my key production ones.

snowleopard.wikidot.com has posted a handy and continuously-updated Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Compatibility List. Users are invited to collaborate by sharing experiences using each application and by adding applications not already listed.

There are now four categories:
UNKNOWN is for apps that are untested
OK for apps that work fine
NO for apps that do not work
and
WARNING for those with some problems.

Pertinent example:

Adobe Photoshop Elements
http://www.adobe.com/
NO
After restoring from Time Machine app gives a licence error

There's a showstopper for me, or at least a major inconvenience. I use Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 for production work, and its Bridge companion application as my preferred photo browser instead of iPhoto. Since I have two Power PC Macs in daily service that will still support PSE, I wouldn't be completely out on a limb, but no PSE on my main production Mac would definitely be a pain, so I'm hoping Adobe will get a compatibility patch out the door without too much delay. In the meantime, that issue definitely cools my jets about rushing to install Snow Leopard. Maybe I'll put my order in next week

For the compatibility wiki full list, see:
http://snowleopard.wikidot.com

Charles W. Moore

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