Over the last few hours I've been making the jump to OS X Tiger. I actually did a clean install late last night, when my backup had successfully completed. This morning has been the process of copying the essentials back from the backup: my Development directory (10gb), Documents (3.2gb), Mail (1.3gb), preference files (why aren't they kept in a more obvious place), and finally the biggie, 34gb of music. It was a lot easier to get everything up and running this time - maybe three hours tops. It helps to know what is where and what you need.
It took me two attempts to get Tiger installed. The first time I missed the 'customise' option on the install, which gives me the opportunity to dump support for other languages and printers. That makes quite a saving on disk space.
I also missed a trick with spotlight indexing: the first time I installed, it automatically started indexing my external drives (which are slow as hell, and don't need indexing). The second time round, I went into System Preferences and into the Privacy tab before plugging in the external drives. When I plugged them in, they automatically appeared in the indexing exclusion list. Nice. (I wonder if this affects the unix locate utility? I'd love to exclude the external drives from that, but all the howtos I read suggest you need to modify binaries ... urgh).
One thing that really hits home as I try and work on the laptop during significant file copies: the hard disk in the powerbook is really slow. Mind-numbingly slow. Not only that, but every application slows to a crawl despite CPU load being relatively minor. I wonder how much battery life would be affected by a bigger, faster drive in this machine.
So, first impressions of Tiger: meh. Not sure I like the new-style interface, it's just another layer of confusion. Mail.app really needs to go full-screen now the Mail folders drawer is built-in. Dashboard: well, I had Konfabulator before so no big deal. iChat: it's nice to have Jabber built-in. Mail.app seems to want to make all my signatures look like HTML. More as I discover it...
Posted by savs at July 1, 2005 10:09 AM