OS X Leopard 10.5.1
Most of you know we’re a mac family. And, like many of those brainwashed by His Steveness, we upgraded to 10.5 starting the day after it came out. Here’s a status report.
- The system seems faster, at least once the spotlight indexer is done. Even on old gear, the system just seems more responsive. I’m not the only one making that observation.
- Spotlight indexing after you fresh install and restore all your data SUCKS. For a couple hours of suck in my case. Once caught up, it becomes invisible.
- .mac and idisk worked great on all the machines we installed 10.5.0 retail box on. However, the wife’s brand spankin new macbook, which came with “restore media”, failed. And, the 10.5.0 retail box would not work on the macbook. Sigh. With last night’s 10.5.1 release, the wife’s iDisk syncing problems have entirely gone away.
- One machine out of the 6 (no, not a typo..) had issues with MS office, and the auto updater that can’t seem to update itself. On that host I downloaded all the patches from MS and installed’em one at a time. Office is working on all the hosts. Boy, sure would be nice to get an intel build though!
- Everyone in the family is using Time Machine, backing up to a central mac mini with external storage. It Just Works.
- Remote management is built in and *easy* to use. Enable screen sharing on all the hosts, done. Everyone advertises via Bonour, so screen sharring is available by just browsing the network.
- Via shell, you can type
open vnc://hostanmeand it Just Works. - One thing that sucks about the built in VNC: No full screen mode.
- One thing that rules: Built in tightvnc. And the screen background is automatically dummied out.
- Terminal: shift-apple-double click urls, opens automatically.
- Terminal is *stable* for me. This alone is a feature compared to past versions. I’ve managed to avoid X11 and XDarwin entirely since installing Leopard.
- GPG mail broke. There’s a beta. Get on the mailing list, check the archives. The beta works on the latest version of Mail.
- Other than breaking plugins the new mail seems nice and more robust for my imap-over-socks use.
- Neither the wife nor the kids are yelling at me to restore Tiger.
Lots of little things suck into 10.5. Apple lists 300 new features, but .. that’s far from all of them. None breathtaking on their own, but overall, this is a heck of a release.