Tiger as primary system: When?

fryke

fryke

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With every new betatest phase of OS X, there comes the point when I want to test it against my 'real' system, to see what actually _working_ with it is going to be like. Before 8A323, I didn't think that moment had come yet. Well _actually_, I think it's still a bit early.

Well: I've chosen to jump into the cold water now. Backed up my drive and installed 8A323 (and then 8A323A) on my PowerBook. I upgraded it (which with earlier builds led to severe problems sometimes, such as no networking etc.) and it works fine.

Well, _fine_ would probably be the wrong term. Let's say: My data's still here. My settings are, too. There's the occasional graphical glitch (better in 8A323A than before), but I can live with that.

Spotlight's great. I love it in E-Mail.

Any questions?
 
I wonder how you will "update" the system once there is a newer build? Will you need to completely erase the disk and reinstall or would something like SU work?
 
Newer builds don't come in Software Update, normally (just small patches to test SU, mostly doing nothing, although this last one did...). In Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar and Panther, I usually did the following process when a new build was available:

1.) Back up the working system (CCC or something, anything really just make sure I have a backup).
2.) Do a normal upgrade to the new build, just as if you'd upgrade from Jaguar to Panther.
3.) If that works, everything's fine, if it breaks/stalls/panicks... ->
4.) Clean install the new build and get my home folder content as well as apps and prefs etc. from the backup.

Sure, that last step sounds annoying, but once you're accustomed to it, it's a rather good way of solving problems on final systems, too. Clean installing OS X doesn't take very long (whether it's a final build or a test build) and having a current backup is a must for me, anyway. If you've done it a few times, you know what exactly is needed for your system to be back up where you want it...

Apple usually _doesn't_ allow Final Candidate and Final versions to upgrade earlier test builds. So _then_ I'll have to do step 4) anyway. But I think that the arrival of a new big version of the cats is the best chance to clean up one's system, anyway - and even if you're on Panther when Tiger is released, I'd suggest doing what I do, i.e. backup, erase your harddrive, clean install Tiger and bring back what you need from the backup. This way you can also get rid of stuff that you didn't even _know_ you still had on your system (taking space you'd have free...).
 
As you have a large experience with it, would you mind writing a short [How To] smart backup your complete Mac (applications, multiple users...). Because, as I do it only each second year, I tend to have to spend a lot of time to fine tune what I am doing each time and this takes my days before I have everything under control again. My two major problems are other users and applications (indeed the library part of applications).
 
Well... Basically there's the easy and the difficult part.

And for users who, like in OS 9 and earlier, put things all over the harddrive, the following list does not apply. If you're such a person, just make sure you REMEMBER where you've put your stuff. Chaotic people, those. ;)

For backing up, I advise to backup everything. CCC to an image, for example. But other backup solutions can achieve the same. Takes a while, but you've _got_ everything backed up afterwards.

Then you install the system. Easy, too.

You then best setup the users with the _same_ shortnames as before (unless you've gotta add some) and give them the same rights etc. as before the reinstallation.

Then you replace the contents of the new home folders with the stuff in the backup. Everything. You can do this in the Finder (by loggin' in as the user in question to keep the user rights intact) directly. Just make sure you logout right after the copying is complete, so no application tries to overwrite the prefs files you just copied over.

After all the users are in place, there's basically the following:

1.) /Applications/
You just choose any third-party application in the backup's /Applications folder and hit Cmd-C. Go to the new installation's apps folder and hit Cmd-V. Same for apps in the /Applications/Utilities folder.

2.) /Library/Application Support/
You'll find a lot of stuff here. Basically, copy everything over that seems to belong to applications you still intend to use. The folders are named after the developing companies, AFAIK. Depending on the installed apps, you might also want to check whether there's /System/Library/Application Support/. On my systems, there isn't such a folder. So nothing to copy.

3.) Check the applications and settings. If the applications don't want to run, you have to reinstall them. Don't have to delete them, usually, just install them over the already installed versions. There simply _are_ some apps that don't "behave" well here. Xpress, as far as I know, needs to be reinstalled, for example.

4.) Fink and other UNIX stuff
I don't know about fink. Maybe there's a way to just copy things over (_should_ be in my opinion), but probably you'll need a newer version of fink for a newer OS X version and you maybe even want to recompile the stuff with the newer GCC version?
Your hand-tooled configuration files for Apache and other things, you'll want to just copy over from the backup.

I guess my way of backing up and reinstalling isn't ever going to be simple, since it basically mixes a fresh install with several 'parts' from your old system (although nothing that could hurt the new system) - and those depend on the user, really.
 
Yes, I can vouch for what Fryke has outlined. I just did this recently (2 weeks ago) and it went without a hitch and was done within just about 2-3 hours. Quite a smooth transition as long as you have things basically in the right place.
 
I used a similar method to move all accounts from one Mac to another, with one difference: I created one zip file for each users' account to be able to port users independently.

BTW most of my applications are installed on another disk, freeing room on my main disk for the system.
 
Oh, one more note to amend what Fryke had mentioned about logging out just as soon as you're done copying. I would advise that you actually log on as an admin user that previously did not exist that you create and perform the copying that way. You can then either run Disk Utility and repair permissions, or I prefer just to jump into bash and `chown -R user_short_name:user_short_name /Users/user_short_name` so that things are happily owned by the right (likely new) uid (user id).
 
Right... Btw.: I just had to switch back to Panther. ;) ... That beautiful Tiger installation didn't want to finish loading my user anymore (it loaded Stickies.app, then killed it, tried again...). After trying the usual (repair permissions, repair volume etc.), I decided that I'll try again with the next build and used my ASR image to restore 10.3.6. Back where I was two days ago... ;)
 
Heh. I have the luxury of not having critical work type stuff that I can't live without on my systems. I usually load the betas on my everyday systems and haven't had a melt-down yet -- well, there were a few Panther builds that didn't seem to want to play nice with dual processor systems (or was it limited to dual G4s?) in that if you made even the slightest adustment to the Network preferences you would get kernel panics once networking was initialized. Other than that I've had no problems running the beta builds as my primary OS.
 
When? Not yet.

8A323 is still too buggy/unstable for me to use day-to-day, even on non-critical stuff.

There's also the brand new problem I have that I'm sure the tech reviewers will be complaining about: I just don't see a "killer" reason to upgrade.

Spotlight will probably be nice, and the new Mail will help. iChat AV would be cool if I could ever get it to work with anyone (which I haven't, mostly AIM users tho). I'm also really into whizz-bang eye candy so Dashboard appeals to me for that reason, but I just haven't found anythng particularly useful to do with them (partly because I don't like the idea that I have to hit a special key or mouse button just to see the widgets, then they disappear if I want to do anything else).

I guess we'll see. Automator might be useful to me (as an easier-to-use AppleScript), but I was really hoping to see some added "killer features" before its release. I suspect most users will be left saying "yeah, and?", and only upgrade because Apple will essentally kill support for 10.3.

(Last complaint - I hate that they've made the Apple menu button and Spotlight button "anemic grey" instead of "tasteful splash-of-color" blue. I get the feeling that if they thought they could get away with it, Graphite would be the only color scheme available)
 
cybergoober: I haven't had many problems with this build either (and have a long history of not having problems with early OS X builds...), but the login problem is a known bug in 8A323 (and probably 8A323A, too), so I guess it was to be expected. Also: Updating a long-running installation of Panther to an early Tiger build is bound to show more problems than a system that doesn't have many 3rd party apps, utilities and, well, files on it. I guess my Tiger installation went pretty well, and for some time, it worked beautifully. Maybe I could've saved myself by adding another user initially and then changing things on my main account from that second user's login. But I didn't plan on doing that and planned on going back instead if big problems would arise. And sure they did. ;)

I'm looking forward to updating this very system to the next Tiger build again, though... Like mentioned above in this thread, moving back and forth is not much of a hassle if you're used to it.
 
Zammy Sam said
wonder how you will "update" the system once there is a newer build? Will you need to completely erase the disk and reinstall or would something like SU work?

I've partitioned my drive into 3 volumes
Panther
Tiger
Users

I changed my home folder in NetInfo to point to /Volumes/Users/ instead of /Users/
Now when the next build comes out I can just erase and install on the Tiger volumes. Add the user in Accounts and change the NetInfo home dir and I'm all set.
 
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