Abby and Win’s Blog

Posts Tagged ‘leopard’

My work recently ordered our Snow Leopard DVD so we can upgrade our iMacs. I did my usual Time Machine backup and upgraded. I didn’t worry much about compatibility since my personal 13″ MBP has been running SL for a few months now and it had the same apps installed – no problems at all.

After I upgrade my work’s iMac, there were problems. I kept getting errors from my Symantec antivirus (I had to install it, work policy even though it isn’t necessary). I reinstalled it and it warned me to install Rosetta. I thought that would be the “aha” so I installed it. It looks like it fixed that problem, but now my Adobe CS3 apps crashes when I launch them. I Googled and it turns out there is an existing compatibility issue with CS3 and SL. It’s weird though since my MBP runs CS3 without a problem.

So now I got another external firewire hard drive. What I’m going to do is restore a backup that I made in Time Machine before upgrade onto an external hard drive. This way I can make sure that’s a clean copy before formatting and restoring it onto my iMac’s hard drive. This is why I love using Macs. When running into problems, I have several options to restore without losing data – as long as you back up data.

Once this is complete and I’m satisfied with the restored data, I will restore the backup onto the iMac. Then I’ll format the external drive and install a clean copy of SL and migrate my Leopard over to see if it’s SL or just my iMac configurations.

Apple recently released 10.5.3 update for Leopard. One of the updates I’m excited about is the ability to sync Address Book with Google and Yahoo!. If you want to set up a sync with Yahoo!, view this page http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/addressbook/autosync/autosync-20.html. For Google, visit this page http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/05/mac-os-x-1053-sync-google-contacts.html. The only problem I found so far is with Google and contacts that have “Company” checked on your Address Book. These contacts seem to show up as blank in the contacts list (http://www.google.com/support/contactsync/#anchor_link_9). But if you click on it in Gmail, it will display the information.

For the past couple of days I’ve been trying to set up one of our XServe running Leopard Server at work for web hosting. I was able to configure the Web, AFP, and SMB properly. The problem I was having was configuring MySQL. It was easy to enable but trying to connect to it from other computers in the same domain was the problem. There’s a checkbox with “Allow network connections” in the Server Admin section of MySQL. So I checked it, save, and restarted it. I still wasn’t able to connect. I checked for firewall settings. I pinged the host and got a response. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. So I googled it.

The common answer I found was to edit the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file. Well it’s not there but I did find a /etc/my.cnf file. So I tried editing that file and restarting. It didn’t work.

Then I remembered that the php.ini file that Leopard Server is using isn’t in the default location /etc/php.ini, but it ran the /private/etc/php.ini. So I looked in there and found another my.cnf file. I edited the file by adding # in front of skip-networking entry. I restarted it and it finally worked.

So here’s what you need to do:

• Go into Server Admin and check the Allow network connections and save
• Comment out the skip-networking entry from /private/etc/my.cnf
• Add the IP address of the computer you will be accessing MySQL remotely
• Give it the privileges it needs
• Restart MySQL

That should allow you to connect to MySQL running on Leopard Server remotely.

I just want to let you know the experience I had with upgrade to Leopard from Tiger. The upgrade went smooth on my PowerMac G5. It took about 48 minutes. All my apps seem to still be compatible.

Then I started to upgrade my MacBook Pro. Things looked normal. The trouble started after my laptop restarted once the upgrade process completed. It was stuck in the all too familiar blue screen of death (Apple version). I felt like I was back in Windows again. Apparently, it’s giving many people problems as well – http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1195031&tstart=0.

I left it on that screen over night and woke up this morning still in the same screen. There are 2 possible solutions that I’ve read so far in that long list of discussion.

Option 1: Archive and Install. This is the route I took and so far it seems to work. There are reported issues with Mail crashing when doing this method though. I don’t use Mail much so it is not a concern. This will require more hard drive space, I believe an extra 4GB is needed.

Option 2: Restart in Single User mode and enter some commands. I would’ve tried this by the time I read the post, I was already doing the Archive and Install. There is a chance that your administrator rights will be removed.

So far:

- Time Machine lives up to the hype. You are still able to use the selected external hard drive as a regular storage drive along with using it with Time Machine.
- Browsing other computers on the network have never been easier.
- Spotlight will be indexing your files after the install/upgrade. Depending on how much data you have, will determine how long it takes. On my G5 it took about 30. It will not prevent you from doing other things. It runs quietly in the background.
- Quick Look is great and fast. Viewing files from Windows displays the “blue screen of death” as the icon.

Hope this helps you guys. Even though I had problems upgrading my laptop, I still feel it’s worth the upgrade. Just make sure to back up.

And finally, I am glad I got to experience an Apple release event. There were about 200 people in line as they started to sell Leopard. It’s interesting that even though there are not many Apple users as Windows users; whenever Apple has something new to offer, majority of its users respond.

UPDATE: My MBP was affected by the admin bug. I was worried for a moment and I didn’t feel like doing a clean install tonight. Here’s what I did:

1. Shutdown
2. Turn on the computer and hold down Apple + S to get in to single user mode
3. Type: /sbin/mount -uw /
4. Type: passwd
5. Enter your new password for root
6. Confirm it by retyping it again
7. Type: reboot
8. Once your back in, go to System Preference and edit your user accounts. When it asks for the admin’s username and password, enter root and the new password
9. Logoff and log back in and your set

Hope that helps some of you.

I recently watched the guided tour of OS X Leopard and am more excited than ever. There are so many things I’ve been waiting for aside from a new OS like Time Machine, Spaces, Quick Look, and the new Finder. I’ll probably renew my .Mac account so I can use Back to My Mac feature. I can’t wait. I’m gonna be preparing my G5 at home for the new install. I don’t usually do the upgrade method. I prefer the clean install. So tonight, I will be busy backing up files and iPhoto and iTunes library files.

I heard people will start to line up at 6am tomorrow. That’s outrageous but I hope I can leave work early enough and get a copy.