Snow Leopard - smooth install

I have now installed Snow Leopard on 3 machines (1 more to go plus a server).

I had waited about a week and between the effort the vendors put in before the release and the updates that came out a bit later, only a few issues arose during the upgrade process.

I am able to use the built-in CISCO VPN support and after I fixed the keychain access issue, I did not have to supply my password every connection.  I also learned that one can use CMD+SHIFT+G to change a browse window to another directory including the ones that are not easily browsable by the Apple GUI.

I’ll talk about conversion of e-mail from IMAP to Exchange servers to the new Apple-Exchange 2007 Web Services approach in another post.

I did have to specifically upgrade Microsoft’s Remote Desktop connection product as it had not auto-updated (or informed me) to its recent release.  It may be it just needed a “re-install” to insert special bits somewhere.

Like others, on one machine wanted to know where System Events.app was. I was presented a GUI to browse to the file (and found it it in System/Library/CoreServices.)

A few of the Mail.app plug-ins have not been upgraded yet.  These were automatically disabled.

The DVD includes the latest Xcode (3.2) which I installed and Rosetta which is an option item which I did not do yet.  I am going to try to do without the old programs that only work natively on the PowerPC.  We will see.

Thank goodness Quicksilver still works.  That would be a loss even though there is a new Google tool that is similar.  I modified it to search /Developer for type com.apple.application to pick up those tools on one machine – evidently I had already done it on my other development machine.

I turned Time Machine off on the one machine I use it on during the update and for a couple days in case of the need to retreat.  I have restarted Time Machine, but as one would expect, it is taking a while to catch up to such massive changes to the disk.  Another approach would have been to flush the past and just start the drive over.

Like others, I use applications hosted in Oracle.  Those applications are not yet certified for Java 1.6 and one of them did not work with Safari at a critical point in the application.  I found that if I set Safari to run in 32bit mode (most of my machines are Intel Duo Core 2 and thus 64 bit capable to one degree or another), that the application worked as it did before the upgrade. To choose 32bit mode, select the application in Finder, and then “Get Info”.  On the pane, there is check box to run in 32 bit mode.

I have verified I can do SMB connections to printers and servers as well.

On one machine I had to fix my MacTeX installation in a minor way as described by the MacTeX folks at Tug.

I’ll update this post if I remember (or encounter other things) in a bit.

All in all, much less traumatic than the move to Leopard and we will stay away from discussion migrations in other OS’s.

Update 9/16/09: There seems to be a new 32b version of Java 1.6 in Snow Leopard and there is no other version.  So while I had the experience reported above, it seems I don’t have an understanding of “why” and at this point, after 10.6.1 patch (if that matters), my Oracle application is working in both 32bit and 64bit modes of Safari.