Apple Inc. saw booming sales of the latest version of its operating system over the weekend, which may help boost momentum for the company's line of Mac computers during the holiday season.

Apple said Tuesday that 2 million copies of its Leopard operating system were sold since the product was released on Friday, Oct. 26.

Analyst Keith Bachman, of BMO Capital Markets, estimated that 200,000 of those sales included Macs that were pre-installed with Leopard. And coming off a quarter in which Apple sold 2.16 million Macs running the previous operating system called Tiger, the question facing Apple is whether Leopard will be a force in adding to Mac sales during the end-of-the-year holiday shopping season.....

Apple has a tough act to follow regarding Mac sales. In addition to Apple just coming off its first quarter of more than 2 million Mac sales, technology research firm Gartner Inc. said Apple claimed about 8% of the U.S. PC market during the third quarter of the year.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was released this past Friday to eager Apple fans. With Leopards 300+ new features comes a price in the form of hard disk space.

Apple recommends 9GB of available disk space for a default Leopard installation. While if you are updating a recent computer you should have more than enough hard drive space for installation. The Leopard update can prove a little more difficult if your disk is almost full.

Follow these disk saving tips and you will be enjoying Mac OS X 10.5 with disk space to spare.

Some say Apple's Leopard and Sun's Mustang were meant to run neck and neck -- but so far Java SE 6 is out of the race.

By most accounts, upgrades to Apple's Leopard OS are going smoothly. Some users are reporting disappointment, however, that Flash isn't working correctly; and the much anticipated Java 1.6 is missing. While these two issues won't adversely affect most users, for those who depend on Java and Flash, it's more than just a nuisance. Fortunately, it may be a short-lived one.

Attendees at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this year were excited by confirmation that Java would be bundled with Leopard. There were, however, inherent questions about which version of Java would actually be included. By design, Java 6.0 doesn't easily support Mac OS X Tiger or earlier versions of Apple's operating systems. Unfortunately, many users felt that Java 1.5 lacks the juice today's developers need.

Part useful, part flash, all beautifully easy: Apple's Mac OS X 10 Leopard bounded into stores Friday, thrilling the Mac faithful with a solid and extremely useful upgrade. By maintaining a swift upgrade timeline (Apple generally updates its OS every 18 months, though Leopard had a four-month delay due to the iPhone development) and offering a low single-license price of $129, Apple continues to stand in favorable contrast to its much larger and more entrenched competition. Plus, Leopard delivers several exciting innovations that make using it both more productive and more fun. Windows users, are you considering switching yet?

After the ruckus resulting from having outdated versions of Unsanity's Application Enhancer (APE) installed while upgrading to Leopard, we received a number of questions from readers as to how one can determine whether APE is installed, as well as what version it is. To make sure everyone's on the same page, we decided to do some digging, chatted with Unsanity, and got the low-down on how to proceed with APE and Leopard.

Think backups are a bore? Think again

Since Apple Inc. first announced the initial 10 features of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" in August 2006, the one that has captured the most interest of Macintosh fans is Time Machine. Apple has billed Time Machine as the backup tool for people who hate the task. That's almost everyone, according to Steve Jobs, who says only 4% of computer users regularly back up their data.

The goal set for Apple's engineers in designing Time Machine was to create a backup technology that requires little or no configuration, performs backups automatically and invisibly, and makes restoring files from those backups as simple and intuitive as humanly possible. That's a pretty tall order, even for Apple, and yet the company has managed to deliver those results.

Here are the top-ten Leopard tips from my friends, Adam Engst et al, at Take Control Books. They've already released five ebooks to help people upgrade to Leopard. Take Control publishes minor updates for free, so the authors can revise their books on the fly. These guys are the experts, but I have two Leopard tips as well, more about them later.

We now have four Leopard upgrades running in the house, including my non-supported dual 800 MHz Quicksilver desktop. I thought I would provide some of my personal observations of the corners of the OS I've wandered into.

• Leopard Front Row is amazing.
• Photoshop 7 doesn't run.
• Selective screen capture has new helpful data.
• DVD playing doesn't require a 1.6 GHz processor
• System timing is different.
• Photobooth and iChat are the source of much entertainment..

Yesterday we told you about the seven things you won't like about Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Now it's my turn to point out the good stuff...

Mac OS X Leopard just a bunch of iCandy on top of Tiger? Or, is it a feast of technical goodness under the hood?

Both, and more. The most striking thing about using Leopard is the attention to little things. Mostly. While there are a few crazy things Apple has done with Leopard, when you add up what you like, you like Leopard even more.

So far, almost everything works well following the weekend marathon of Leopard upgrades on my Macs. Maybe it's just my personal perception, but my older Macs actually run faster with Leopard than with Tiger, keeping up the tradition since Jaguar.

Leopard's firewall is a mess, say researchers, shutting off by default and allowing connections even under "block all."

When some of you first saw the Leopard version of the menu bar, I bet there were a few grumbles about its near-invisibility with some screen backdrops. Indeed, I suppose Apple's interface designers took the hint and made it less transparent as time passed. At least, that's what it seems based upon what Steve Jobs presented at the last WWDC and the finished product released last week.

After completing an upgrade installation of Leopard and restarting the computer, a "blue screen" may appear for an extended period of time.

Products affected
• Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Solution

You may have third-party "enhancement" software installed that does not work with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Use one of these solutions.

Solution 1: Reinstall Leopard (recommended)

It may be necessary to perform an Archive and Install installation of Leopard. Archive and Install moves your existing Mac OS X system files to a folder named Previous System, and then installs a new copy of Mac OS X on the selected volume. Mac OS X–installed applications, such as Address Book and Safari, are archived, and new versions are installed in the Applications folder. Applications, plug-ins, and other software may have to be reinstalled after an "Archive and Install." This is covered on page 7 of the Install & Setup Guide included on the Leopard DVD.

You will probably want to check "Preserve user and network settings" when starting the installation.

Note: After installation, verify each third-party software product is compatible with Leopard before reinstalling it, especially any application "enhancement" software.

Solution 2: Use the command line (advanced) to remove application enhancement software

Try this solution if you are comfortable using Terminal and have certain application enhancement installed. The software may be removed following the below steps:

1. Start up in single-user mode by holding Command-S after restarting the computer.
2. Execute these commands, each on a single line:

/sbin/fsck -fy
/sbin/mount -uw /

3. Execute this command on a single line. Important: Type the command carefully, misuse of rm may damage other files.
rm -rf /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/ApplicationEnhancer.bundle

4. Restart normally.

5. If the issue persists, use solution 1 above instead.

Running Time Machine backup or restore operations while Aperture is running may lead to inconsistencies in the Aperture database.

Products affected
• Aperture
• Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Solution

If you use Time Machine with Leopard, be sure to set Time Machine to exclude the Aperture Library from automatic backups. To do so:

1. Open Time Machine.
2. Click the Options button.
3. Click the "+" button in the Do not back up window.
4. Use the resulting file browser to navigate to the location of your Aperture Library. The default location is ~/Pictures/Aperture Library (where "~" represents your home folder).
5. Click the Exclude button.
6. Click the Done button.

Note that this means that your Aperture Library will not be backed up by Time Machine. Be sure to manually back up your Aperture Library.

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