Leopard Bites!
Apple released Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard' on Friday 26th October, and for many early adopters it's been a mixed bag of experiences judging by the howls of anguish.
Leopard is a radical change from Tiger. The transition from Panther to Tiger was reasonably straightforward, but the transition from Tiger to Leopard is something else, due mainly I guess to the significant reworking of the underlying system, eye-candy notwithstanding.
I had a bit of a play on Friday. On my test Mac (Intel Mac mini) I did an erase and install, so it was a clean installation. The first thing I came up against was I could no longer print to my FujiXerox DocuPrint 204A. The driver software from FujiXerox isn't compatible. Printing under Leopard is via CUPS 1.3.3, the latest release from the now-Apple-owned Common Unix Printing System (it was v1.1 under Tiger). Big difference! Judging by the thousands of posting on the Apple Support Discussions for Printing, this change has been a show-stopper for many.
The Leopard installer DVD comes with a slew of Leopard-compatible drivers included as an optional install, so in many cases just deleting the previous version of the driver software and installing the new version fixed the problem for some. In my case, there isn't a compatible driver for my printer available. However, I worked out that it's a re-badged Brother printer, so by selecting THAT driver I've restored printing - so if you've tried everything else that may be another avenue to go down. [Another new feature is that any printer driver in your installed list may have it's driver software updated via Apple Software Update when a new version is released....].
Probably one of the biggest issues is that Leopard breaks compatibility with Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 (from CS3). Officially, Adobe is saying that the rest of CS3 is Leopard compatible without further updates - and CS2 and earlier versions of CS and other applications may or may not work, but they won't be supporting them under Leopard. As for Acrobat Professional and Reader....late January 2008!
My previous advice still holds good - don't be an early adopter in a production environment - and if you must play, either clone your existing installation so you can revert if you have to, or just install Leopard onto another internal or external drive and boot up from that.
Don't forget to check Apple Software Update (System Preferences > Software Update) and your software developer websites regularly for new versions - there's been a few this past weekend and a lot more to come!
Leopard is a radical change from Tiger. The transition from Panther to Tiger was reasonably straightforward, but the transition from Tiger to Leopard is something else, due mainly I guess to the significant reworking of the underlying system, eye-candy notwithstanding.
I had a bit of a play on Friday. On my test Mac (Intel Mac mini) I did an erase and install, so it was a clean installation. The first thing I came up against was I could no longer print to my FujiXerox DocuPrint 204A. The driver software from FujiXerox isn't compatible. Printing under Leopard is via CUPS 1.3.3, the latest release from the now-Apple-owned Common Unix Printing System (it was v1.1 under Tiger). Big difference! Judging by the thousands of posting on the Apple Support Discussions for Printing, this change has been a show-stopper for many.
The Leopard installer DVD comes with a slew of Leopard-compatible drivers included as an optional install, so in many cases just deleting the previous version of the driver software and installing the new version fixed the problem for some. In my case, there isn't a compatible driver for my printer available. However, I worked out that it's a re-badged Brother printer, so by selecting THAT driver I've restored printing - so if you've tried everything else that may be another avenue to go down. [Another new feature is that any printer driver in your installed list may have it's driver software updated via Apple Software Update when a new version is released....].
Probably one of the biggest issues is that Leopard breaks compatibility with Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 (from CS3). Officially, Adobe is saying that the rest of CS3 is Leopard compatible without further updates - and CS2 and earlier versions of CS and other applications may or may not work, but they won't be supporting them under Leopard. As for Acrobat Professional and Reader....late January 2008!
My previous advice still holds good - don't be an early adopter in a production environment - and if you must play, either clone your existing installation so you can revert if you have to, or just install Leopard onto another internal or external drive and boot up from that.
Don't forget to check Apple Software Update (System Preferences > Software Update) and your software developer websites regularly for new versions - there's been a few this past weekend and a lot more to come!