Here are the result of installing OS X Leopard:
My Laptop – Success
MacBook Pro, hardware is a few months old and consequently the installed OS is equally old. I used the “upgrade” install (as opposed to the “archive and replace” install, as I didn’t realize there were two different places in the installer to pick install options.) Successful, no incidents.
TV Mac Mini – Fail, Fail, Fail
Single core Intel Mac Mini, a couple of years old, had the original OS. Installed with the “upgrade” install (again, didn’t realize at the time that there was more than one install options screen.) Install went well, but iTunes refused to let me add videos, be they podcasts, TV shows, or whatever. “Refused” is a polite way of saying “hung and had to be killed.” This is not acceptable, given it’s the ONLY thing connected to the TELEVISION–it’s the one source of video media in the house. Front Row worked well for DVDs and shared videos, but because no local videos could be added, was a little useless.
I decided it was probably an installation issue–perhaps an old QuickTime codec (Perian or Flip4Mac or DivX), so reinstalled with the “archive and replace” method (now that I discovered it really was there, I was just looking in the wrong place.) Same iTunes issue. I figured something got kept, as some of the Bluetooth pairings persisted across the install. Reinstalled with the “format drive” option. Same iTunes issue. Reverted to Tiger today because I can’t have a media center sans video.
iMac – Fail, Fail, Success
G3 iMac, repository for all music, print server, several years old, previously upgraded using “archive and replace” method. Again, this was the “upgrade” install (for the saeme reasons.) Leopard installer died with blue screen of death issue others reported (boots up to just before the login window, with a cyan background and mouse pointer but nothing else.) Reinstalled with “archive and replace” to a different problem: spinning beachball mouse pointer just after login, with the machine effectively hung. Booted in Firewire disk mode, backed up a few minor things that were not mirrored on the network attached backup disk, reinstalled with the “format drive” option. Works beautifully now.
Kim’s Laptop – Success
PowerBook G4, fairly fresh OS install (I reformatted and reinstalled when she inherited it), selected “archive and replace” Leopard install. Successful, no incidents.
Basement Mac Mini – Abstain
Older PPC Mac Mini, in basement, acts as destination for ports poked through firewall (SSH, VPN, web, etc.) Because the VPN was tricky to set up (they want you to buy the server version of OS X, so they cripple VPN in the consumer OS) and because of the other issues, I’m not attempting a Leopard install on this for weeks.
I am supposed to get my disks in the mail today. I have an external firewire drive, so with my 1.33ghz laptop, I was planning on backing up to it, then doing an erase and install, then moving back over my user account. I have never trusted apple with its “upgrade” option. It does not seem as reliable in my experience. Also, the HD is only 80gb and is pretty full, so this really would not work anyway. Your experiences have confirmed that this is the way to go. Apparently, apple has a fix for the blue screen of death now.
I am really excited about the performance increase potential on my Mac Pro 8 core. Apparently, they have some sort of code to utilize the now dormant 4 cores. We shall see.
If you are ever in the OC, I can burn you a copy of OSX server for the PPC. We use it at work.