Category: Leopard

OQO Running OS X Leopard

A member of the forum OQO Talk named TRF has managed to successfully hack the OQO to run OS X Leopard. The OQO is setup in a dual-boot of Vista and OS X Leopard.

Wifi, sound, power management, and Bluetooth all work, the only thing missing is WWAN access and TRF is already working on getting that running.

While it isn’t exactly an easy hack TRF says that it is “definitely doable.” This makes the OQO now the smallest computer to run OS X (that I know of at least).

This is absolutely amazing to me, I don’t think that I would ever use this, mostly because I would rather just buy a MacBook and an iPhone and save myself a lot of trouble messing with stuff, BUT, I can appreciate the novelty of it.

Forum Post
Full Video On YouTube

Time Machine Backups Over Airport Disk Not Supported By Apple

So with the recent Airport Extreme Base Station update a wonderful little feature showed up, you could now choose Airport Disks for Time Machine backups. So many people thought that this must have been some sort of mistake or that Apple finally released a feature that was originally supposed to be included in Leopard.

It turns out that this is an unsupported feature, which is very surprising since it was supposed to be their in the first place.

So should you use it to backup your computer? Maybe, maybe not, I personally wouldn’t use it but that’s because currently Time Machine is my only backup, but I think if you had multiple backups and you tested the Airport Disk backup a few times to make sure it was working right, I don’t think you would have any problems with it (don’t quote me on that).

Remember that if YOU have any problems using this feature and you end up losing all of your data it isn’t my fault, and just because you can’t go to Apple about it doesn’t mean that it is my fault, I don’t THINK you will have any problems, but I wouldn’t rely on it myself.

TidBITS

Install Leopard on a PC

I love the Mac operating system but I’ll tell you what, it has always frustrated me that you can’t build your own Mac. I’ve been building computers for about 5 years now and when I switched to the Mac a year ago I pretty much left that behind me (luckily my family members still want me to build them computers).

But now since you can run Leopard on a PC, you can build your own Mac. Here are the steps.

  • Head over to Mininova and grab the modified Leopard ISO (I’m not linking directly to it but I’ll give you a hint, searching for “iATKOS v1.0i” would be pretty interesting)
  • The ISO is about 2.09GB and it shouldn’t be too hard to find.
  • Burn the ISO to a DVD
  • Boot from the freshly burned DVD and follow the on screen instructions.

The installation takes about in hour but once that is finished you will have a nice fresh copy of Leopard installed.

Currently only some Intel based processors work and AMD processors are not supported.

Remember that this may break the license agreement of Leopard and because of the DMCA it is of questionable legality.

I Second the Motion, Leopard Makes Me Mad Too

That’s right, Leopard makes me mad! I don’t know exactly if it is Leopards fault but I do know that there isn’t any explanation for what I’m about to tell you, Leopard completely, and I mean completely crashes on me, almost weekly.

Now this isn’t just a kernel panic, where I can hold down the power button to shut off the computer and turn it back on again and everything works fine, oh no no no, this is the kind of crash where one day I decide to turn my computer on and it WILL NOT boot into the desktop.

Like I said before, this happens almost weekly, I fairly sure there is nothing wrong with my hard drive, or my computer because a few times when I reinstalled I used “Archive and Install” and all of my data was intact and worked fine, so the only thing on my hard drive that was screwed up was Leopard itself.

I’ve mentioned the problem before (here), but I figured it was just an isolated incident and that everyone else was just peachy keen with Leopard, than I read “Leopard is the New Vista, and It’s Pissing Me Off.”

Now, Oliver Rist doesn’t seem to have quite the problems that I do with Leopard but it did make me realize that Leopard isn’t really that perfect.

3 or 4 times already I have had to completely reinstall Leopard from the ground up, preforming a format of the hard drive I am using (including writing zeros across the entire disk, just to make sure). Luckily Time Machine had my back and I was able to retain my data (I’m starting to think that this is the reason Time Machine was included in Leopard).

I don’t exactly know what to do though, I don’t know if it is time for a new computer, time for a new hard drive, or time to switch back to Tiger. The problem with switching back to Tiger is that, well, I feel that I won’t back up unless I have Time Machine and that means that if I AM wrong and it IS my hard drive, I could be in for a catastrophic disaster.

If any of you out there are having similar problems or are having problems at all with Leopard leave a comment I’d like to know how frustrated Leopard is leaving people.

Mac OS X 10.5.1 is Released and My MacBook Doesn’t Boot

So yesterday Apple released 10.5.1 and the update didn’t go so smoothly for me. This same thing actually happened when I updated Quicktime to 7.3 and iTunes to 7.5, after the install of the update Software Update told me that it had to restart my computer for the updates to take effect. So my MacBook began restarting and it never booted into OS X, the computer would cycle between the Apple logo and the prohibitory symbol at start up.

I tried everything I could think of to try and make the computer boot, I then resorted to booting up in Verbose mode (holding command+v at boot up). After doing so I realized that the kernel wasn’t loading. I had to do an Archive and Install of Leopard to get things working again. Luckily I was able to get everything working perfectly within just a few hours.

Like I said earlier this has happened twice, once with this update and again with the most recent iTunes and Quicktime updates. I don’t exactly know what is going on but I do know that from now on I’m going to back up my data right before every software update (I probably should anyway).

So back to the actual update itself. 10.5.1 fixed many bugs including improving the reliability of Back to My Mac-enabled Macs appearing in the Finder’s Shared Sidebar, improving reliabilty of iCal alarms that are delivered by email, many fixes for Apple Mail.app, etc.

I suggest that all of you go ahead and grab the update if you haven’t already but I do suggest that you have a full backup of your system before actually updating (you don’t want to go through what I went through).

A full list of the fixes for this update can be found here.

My Leopard Impressions

As many of you know Leopard came out on Friday and well, I have it (if you didn’t figure that out from my last post, I’ll have to make it clearer next time a situation like this arises). I do like Leopard a lot, many of the features are great but some of them aren’t that great.

I’ll start off by mentioning the 5 things that I said were my most anticipated features (read this post if you need to catch up), then I’m going to list the things that surprised me about Leopard.

First off is Web Clip, which is really nice to have, but I haven’t actually used it yet other than to just try something out to see how it worked, which was nice. The practical application for Web Clips doesn’t really seem to be there, not just because to look at widgets you have to go into Dashboard land (and if you are anything like me I enjoy spending my time staring at a Firefox window) but also because I can’t think of any reason I really would use it, with the use of RSS readers and widgets that are already available I guess I just can’t find the value in building a widget from a section of a web page.

Next we have Stacks which I believe are one of the number one reasons to buy OS X Leopard, you wouldn’t believe how much I love this feature. It is so handy to have my downloads just sitting in my dock waiting for me to deal with them. I currently have 3 stacks sitting in my dock, the downloads stack which I mentioned above, a stack of the Documents folder, and last I have a stack that is filled with aliases to applications that I use often but not often enough to have their own spot on the dock itself (super handy).

Let’s move on to Frontrow. I really love the new look of Frontrow and I’m amazed at how much faster it is than Frontrow from Tiger, which might have been the slowest application in the world. The only thing that I don’t like about the new version of Frontrow is the movie trailers section, in the first version of Frontrow you could see the movie poster of all of the movie trailers tiled on your screen, which made it very easy to figure out what movie is what, with the new version of Frontrow it is just a list with a single picture on the left side, which is a picture of the movie you are currently highlighting, this doesn’t make finding a specific trailer easy when you can’t really place the name of the movie with what it actually is and vice versa.

We’re almost done with the first five, Quick Look. I don’t use quick look and I’ll tell you why, I actually name my documents well enough so that I can actually find what I’m looking for, I do know some people who aren’t as good at naming documents as I am and I think that Quick Look would work very well for them but for me it isn’t really useful. I guess if I often looked through folders of pictures Quick Look would actually be useful, but I have a little application called iPhoto that works just fine for me.

Continue reading My Leopard Impressions

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Day

I ordered Leopard on Wednesday and it should be delivered to my door by FedEx sometime this morning. I have to be honest with all of you, i am not terribly excited about Leopard (mostly because there isn’t one feature that I’m really excited about). The features, after added all up, are great but it is hard to name  any one feature I’m really excited about. But, luckily I am able to tell you more than one feature I’m excited for, so I’ll tell you 5 of my favorites.

(These are in no particular order)

1. Web Clip – The ability to take sections of a web page and turn it into a widget. Do I really have to say more, this feature that has seemed to disapear from the the “top X Leopard features” lists is still on mine, basically because I still like using widgets but don’t want to have to learn how to code my own.

2. Stacks – Stacks are basically just folders that sit in the dock and allow you to easily get at the contents of it. I’m excited for stacks because I find myself dealing with a lot of files and having all of the files at my fingertips (right in the dock) will make it much easier for me.

3. Frontrow – Frontrow now looks just like the AppleTV interface. I’m excited about it because I love the look of the AppleTV interface and I often times use Frontrow to view my content and a better interface is always good.

4. Quick Look – The ability to quickly look at your files without having to open an application to view them. AMAZING.

5. Spaces – Now, I’ve tried applications like this before but Apple is doing it a little bit differently than all the others. I’ve also never used a computer with such a small screen, I’m using a 13″ MacBook and I think that spaces could lend itself nicely to smaller screens.

So there you have it, I will be waiting at my doorstep this morning for my FedEx guy to show up with my copy of Leopard. I’ve already backed up all of my data so I’m ready to throw the install DVD in and hit the upgrade button.

Apple Posts Leopard Guided Tour

Apple really does like making these guided tour videos, and why not, they get a bunch of press from it and it helps explain how everything works with the product.

I’m currently downloading both versions of the video (I’m not sure where I’m going to be when I want to watch it). But, it is getting me excited about Leopard, I’m pretty sure that is where my $100 credit is going to be going.

Anyway check out the videos and I hope you enjoy them, I’m sure I will.

Leopard Guided Tour

UPDATE: Check out the video here after the jump.

Continue reading Apple Posts Leopard Guided Tour

Leopard Set for Release October 26th

Apple has officially announced that OS X 10.5 Leopard will be available October 26th for $129 (or $116 with the education discount) and will go on sale in Apple stores at 6PM that night (It seems that Apple is beginning to like the 6PM launch time).

You can pre-order Leopard at the Apple online store here. You can also pre-order it on Amazon.com for $109 here.

Apple has also decided to do a similar program to what Microsoft did, now if you purchase a Mac on or after October 1, 2007 you will be able to upgrade to Leopard for up to $9.95 (for shipping). Click here for more information.

If you are curious about any of the new features that are in Leopard, Apple has made it very easy for you, you can browse all of the new features on one page here.

Leopard Gets a New Intro Video

Recently Apple released another beta version of OS X Leopard, build 9a559. I think the video looks awesome, I’m really excited for Leopard (even though I’m extremely worried that the features added with Leopard aren’t going to be that cool, sorry Time Machine).