Habemus Tigris!

This is a post unrelated to the usual topics haunting this blog (not that there's been many of those lately), but since so many people on the net are searching for information on upgrading to the latest Mac OS, "Tiger", and since before my upgrade I (a) found a lot of very helpful infomation, but (b) still took a bit of a blind leap because very little of what I found pertained to my specific setup, I'd like to contribute a report of my experience with ze Tiger.

This post should be of particular interest to people with a setup similar to mine, which isn't a very unusual one, but most information out on the web right now deals with upgrading newer, faster machines. Hopefully this will help people with slightly older machines who are doubtful about upgrading.

I use a Powerbook G4, bought back during the short-lived titanium-chassis era (yes, the paint is chipped):

• Specs: 667 MHz, 1 GB RAM, 400 Mb/s Firewire, 16 MB ATI Rage Video, CD-RW drive, original IBM 44 GB hard drive.
  
• Peripherals: Advueu flat-panel external monitor, HP 3570c ScanJet scanner, LaCie d2 200 GB external Firewire drive, Altec Lansing speakers, Logitech Cordless Mouseman Optical, Epson C80 inkjet printer, and HP LaserJet 2300n printer.
  

First of all, unless you want your hair to fall out in frustration, do not even consider anything but a clean install. No, I do not mean the "Archive & Install" option provided by the installer, but a true-blue, bona fide, wiping-out-your entire-hard-drive-before-you-do-anything install. It sounds dangerous, but it isn't if you take the right precautions. It will make your computer run faster and better after the upgrade, it will be an opportunity to get rid of a lot of the crud accumulated on your drive over the years, it will force you to make sure all your applications are up-to-date, and it will prevent over 90% of the problems people have been having with their installations.

I wouldn't suggest installing any other way. All reports so far suggest that Tiger is a complex beast with many unresolved issues of compatibility with third-party software. More than just an upgrade, it is a philosophical redesign of the system, and this is a fact that bears many technical consequences. Your system, even if it is just a few months old, has by now accumulated thousands of preferences, settings, drivers, and configuration files. Because of the changes deep down in the system's core, many of these files are guaranteed to clash with the new environment. They will make your machine groan, crawl and crash, instead of growl, pounce and dismember.

The good news is that if you erase and install, the upgrade will be safe and painless. It might take a long time, though—it took me three nights of leaving the machine up, backing up stuff. Note that you'll also need a big external Firewire drive to do it properly, or at least a big networked drive on which you can store your files during the installation. My advice if you don't own a Firewire drive is to get one before you upgrade: it'll be worth it for other purposes, too, because these drives are enormously useful for regular backups (which everyone should be doing anyway) and for storing ever-bigger pictures, movies, and iTunes libraries.

So, in short, what you should do before you install is:

• Make sure your main and your backup drives are both healthy using a utility such as Apple's Disk Utility, Norton Disk Doctor, or Alsoft Diskwarrior.
  
• Burn a copy of all your important documents, pictures, audio files, etc. onto CDs or DVDs. You don't need to do this for audio files for which you own the original CD, but all downloaded music you care about should be backed up.
  
• Make a bootable clone of your entire drive (if you don't know how to do this, see below) with a utility such as Carbon Copy Cloner. Many backup applications can do this as well—I used Intego's Personal Backup X3.
  
• Boot from your external drive and use it for a little while to make sure you can work from it just as you can from your internal one.
  

More thorough instructions on the above procedure can be found here. Once you've carried it through, you can erase your installation drive knowing that if anything goes wrong, you have two backups of all your important documents and one backup of your whole system. Make sure, however, before you click on that "Initialize" button, that you have written down all the registration codes for software you've purchased. You'll need to re-install them later on.

The next step, once your drive has been wiped clean, is to install Tiger itself. The process is simple and self-explanatory, and not much different from installing any application. Since your drive is clean, it'll also be fairly quick (it took 30 minutes on my system to install everything from the core sytem to X11 down to the Chinese version of the OS).

I've heard good things about using Migration Assistant to re-create users and import their data. It seems to work very well for all Apple apps. I actually created new users with the same usernames as before and imported all files manually (synchronizing Mail with my IMAP account to create my mail folders afresh, instead of importing them with the Assistant, took the longest), but from all reports I've read, the easier approach seems to work well too.

Re-installing your applications is a little trickier. Dragging and dropping them into the Applications folder won't work for all of them, and you should make sure, via the user manual or the manufacturer's website, that dragging and dropping is the appropriate installation method for the application before you attempt it. In some cases you might have to go back to the original installer so that the app is properly grafted onto the new system. In all cases, check for updates which the manufacturer may have released to ensure Tiger-compatibility.

At this point you should be done, and Tiger should run glitch-free. Make sure upon first boot that you allow ample time—one or two hours—for Spotlight to build its indexes of your drives. Your system will run slower during this period. After that, it should feel at least as snappy as it was before and Spotlight should be very fast.

My results so far (2 days):

• Even though it is an older model, with relatively little video RAM and without the Velocity Engine, the machine definitely runs faster on Tiger than on Panther. Whether this was accomplished through the purging of my three-year-old drive or the new system itself I can't tell. Most likely it is a result of both.
  
• No conflicts so far on the apps I use most, besides the Apple apps: Microsoft Word v.X, Excel v.X, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Dreamweaver.
  
• I would have purchased this software just for Spotlight and Dictionary. Not having to rely on Sherlock for dictionary searches makes the whole thing usable at last. Besides, dictionaries are supposed to be authoritative, not present you with a myriad different results from different sources the way Sherlock did. And after getting used to Spotlight (takes about 15 mins), you may never use the Finder again to open a file or launch an application.
  
• Printing to the Epson and the LaserJet both work fine.
  
• Dashboard is nice, and I think many people who think it is just eye candy haven't understood it well. Imagine having a bunch of useful little applications to do things like checking the weather, tracking stock market changes, and converting live between currencies or offline between units. Now imagine having all those little apps filling up your Dock and your screen. If they're not on the Dock, though, it is a pain to find them and launch them every time you need them (although less so now that Spotlight is around). Imagine also having to switch from one to other every time you want to, say, check the weather and and your big market winnings. Dashboard takes all the little apps, renames them widgets along the way, and provides something like a parallel desktop for them. You keep using the Dock to launch massive things like Excel and Photoshop, to actually edit documents, and you switch to the Dashboard quickly when you need to check the time in Mumbai or look something up in the dictionary. It is very convenient.
  
• My experience with Dashboard is that it is not slow or as much of a memory-hog as some reports claim. Then again I have 1 GB RAM. Then again that's hardly unusual these days. YMMV.
  
• Both Safari and Mail feel faster. I, too, am not to thrilled about the new Mail interface, but the program feels more solid, somehow.
  
• No noticeable problems with the Powerbook fan running all the time, as some people have reported. Again, YMMV.
  
• Mounting external volumes has worked fine so far for both samba and NFS protocols.
  

Pending testing:

• The HP scanner. Need to download about 200 MB worth of drivers and utilities from HP first.
  
• Burning CDs.
  
• Re-installing and testing unix utilities using Fink.
  
• Adobe Illustrator.
  
• Automator.
  

(As soon as I posted this, Sofware Update jumped out of the Dock to announce the first update to Tiger, 10.4.1.)
 
[Tags: Apple, Mac OS X, Tiger.]