Mac-Techs.com

 Apple’s Snow Leopard is an amazing piece of technology. As such, it’s fairly new and the many refinements and changes to the OS are still being discovered and sometimes tripped over by the user base. In my case, I’ve used Apple products since 1993 or thereabouts when I got my first Mac IIvi. And I’ve followed along, system upgrade after system upgrade.

Being an advanced user, it would follow that system upgrades would be the first thing I would install. As a Mac user, however, one realizes that this isn’t always the best or safest practice.

First comes compatibility issues. New operating systems usually break some tried-and-true software, and Snow Leopard is no different in that respect. Luckily, for me, I am not using any software Snow Leopard is incompatible with.

Having read all the good news about Snow Leopard, the advancements in multi-tasking, updated Quicktime, more stable Finder and so forth. I was ready for the plunge immediately.

One interesting change in OS X 10.6 over earlier versions….the installer does not allow you to do a clean install of the operating system. Archive and reinstall is the only option.

Which brings me to the subject of this author’s travail. After my upgrade, my system seemed to go through a short period of getting acquainted, and all seemed okay for awhile. However, over the past few weeks spinning rainbow wheels of doom and unexplained  hangs in applications led to repeated force shutdowns of my Mac mini.

I was increasingly concerned as my daily Mac usage began to turn into a forced reboot parade resembling the old OS 9 days. Typically, an application, often Firefox, would start the spinning wheel. The Finder would follow shortly thereafter and that was it. Force reboot was the only option as the machine would never shut down or restart on its own.

Finally I realized this was not going to get tweaked into working right. I started to reinstall Snow Leopard and was informed by the installer that my hard drive was not journaled.

Journaling is a way for the OS to keep track of read/writes to the hard drive, so if an operation is interrupted the data in transit can be restored if a corruption issue occurred. In this case, without journaling, my system was taking hits on the hard drive index every time I forced it to reboot.

How did the drive become ‘unjournaled’? Wish I knew. I rebooted, tried installing while starting from the DVD and the installer informed me that the drive was too corrupted to install a system on.

Okay…get out my Disk Warrior CD and reboot from that. This is where it gets really interesting. OS X now has a technique where if the computer is forced to reboot, a disk check sequence is initiated. If it fails, the machine shuts down.

I’ve never heard of this, never seen it on any technical Mac blog or site. So, it seemed to me that my machine was possibly damaged beyond repair.

Reboot, and this time use the EFI volume chooser trick (don’t ask) to boot from the Disk Warrior CD. Repair the drive. Reboot, install Snow Leopard successfully this time. Update to OS 10.6.1. Problem solved, machine is stable.

Moral of the story: don’t wait to reinstall the operating system. You’ll only prolong the agony.

Moving from an older machine to a new one is a scenario that probably fills many Mac users hearts with dread. Not that it’s that difficult to do, just that when you consider all the stuff you accumulate on your Mac, the processes, the applications, the tweaks and the adjustments, it doesn’t seem possible that you could fairly seamless and easily move all that to a new machine and get it up and running in a short amount of time.

Migration Assistant makes it just that easy. Of course, it helps to have a knowledgeable person around so the you get over the humps easily, but all-in-all, it’s one of the things that makes OS X so great.

I assisted a client recently move from a dual-core tower G4 to a almost new video production machine moving into a new role, a Mac Pro with two 3.0GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processors. A screamingly fast system by any account.

The older mac had an e-SATA card in a PCI slot used to drive a SATA drive, which was also the boot drive. Also installed was a high-end PCI audio card.

The Migration Assistant lives in the Utilities folder in Applications. It’s basic operation is to access a mounted volume, copy the information off it and into the new machine’s operating system. Sounds easy, right? The first step in this is to get the older machine’s boot volume mounted on the desktop of the new machine so Migration Assistant could access it.

Macintosh systems have this neat trick called ‘target mode.’ Hold down the ‘T’ key, reboot, and a Firewire icon begins dancing around on the monitor. Target mode puts the computer into a mode that is basically like a big external firewire drive. Plug the target mode machine’s firewire port into another Mac and its drives pop up on the desktop. Voila!

Here we entered our first bump in the journey. The older tower G4′s boot drive was running on an e-SATA card. Target mode didn’t recognize the e-SATA card’s volume, so that scenario hit the rocky reefs of reality in short order.

Lo, there was a workaround. The client had a recent backup, a full duplicate of the boot drive, that we could plug into the new machine’s firewire port. Volume on desktop, and back to Migration Assistant.

Without giving away a lot of the process, let’s just say it’s fairly user friendly. You select the volume to transfer from and you are presented with the users on the volume. You select the one you want to transfer and all the applications, and user login data (everything in the home directory) is moved to the new machine.

Once completed, you have a user login on the new machine identical to the user login on the old machine with all the data and settings transferred. It’s fairly a miracle of modern technology yet is really only possible on Apple’s platform since they control both the OS and the hardware.

There were still some tweaks remaining to get fixed. The audio card was PCI. The new machine’s PCI Express slots are totally incompatible. The firewire scanner was unhappy with the Epson software, so Image Capture was called into action, a great program that most people don’t know exists on their Macs for working with scanners or digital cameras.

Tweak, adjust, get back to work. Total time: 3 hours for the copy, 2 hours getting things fixed, back in business.

It’s typically the case that new operating systems from any vendor are something to approach tentatively with some research on bugs and incompatibilities with existing services and/or software.

In my experience so far, Snow Leopard has been one of the most painless upgrades I have done for my own Mac system. Stability of the operating system has improved and I haven’t found one incompatibility yet aside from Second Life, which seems to not to want to launch.

Initially, I experienced some l-o-o-o-o-o-ng rainbow wheel sessions. Thankfully, actually getting a rainbow wheel has lessened, but when it does pop up it can basically go on for quite awhile.

Overall, I’d say thumbs up.

The arrival of Apple’s newest operating system is another amazing accomplishment by our favorite fruit-based computing company.

• Once again, Apple manages to eke out more speed, optimize the OS, and introduce new technologies in one operating system upgrade on the same hardware. Translation: faster, better, uses less disk space.
• The installer will apparently work on any Intel Mac regardless of whether Leopard/10.5 is installed.
• Some minor changes have occurred to the user interface, such as the dock, column views and Expose.
• The gamma point for monitor display has been set to Windows standard 2.2, so the screen looks a bit more saturated than the previously.
• Snow Leopard signals the end of PPC support, so if you were seeking to upgrade your PPC Mac, get a Leopard 10.5 installer now. Rumor has it that Apple has discontinued sales of 10.5, which is a PPC Mac’s only way to upgrade.
• The installer removes carbon libraries, so typically an install will give you more disk space than before.

On my Mac Mini, the installation left me with 18 gigs (!) of free space, a totally unexpected bonus. I don’t know whether to think that my disk had some errors that were resolved, or there was just a lot of unnecessary OS files.

If you want to learn more about Snow Leopard, check out this great review by John Siracusa on Ars Technica. All you wanted to know about Snow Leopard but were afraid to ask.

This is a nice article discussing some of the competitive aspects of Apple’s and Microsoft’s upcoming OS updates. The really good thing about the article is this graphic:

‘No Justin Long’….a great reason to buy Windows 7!