I upgraded to Leopard again - this time I did it the way I have always done it. Back everything up - blast the hard drive completely and then a fresh install.
I figured that some clever gadget would help me restore my home directories from my backup - perhaps I just cannot figure out newfangled gadgets. So here was my process - feel free to educate me.
Boot into the CD and run the Disk Utility
Make an image from my main partitions onto a USB drive - I did not really want an image - but it was all Disk Utility wanted to let me do.
Blast the main disk in my laptop and install Leopard
Create a new account called "csevadmin" as part of the install - do not create the all important "csev" account yet.
Once log in is complete, you are logged in as csev admin.
Make a new account called "csev" - make it an admin.
Still in csevadmin pop up a terminal window (finally a decent user interface) - Become root
sudo sh
cd /Users
mv csev csev.org
cp -r /Volumes/Blah/Users/csev /Users
Note: Using cp was a bad mistake - I reset all my dates. I should have read my own blog post and done this instead:
cd /Volumes/Blah/Users
tar cf - csev | ( cd /Users ; tar cfv - )
That would have saved my file dates . Ah well onward and upward. Once the directory /Users/csev is in place ou need the magic chown command - which is now different in Leopard.
chown -R csev:staff csev
The "staff" is new - it makes a lot more sense than making a group for every user - but it is different. Also I now learned the modern ":" form of the chown so I don't get nicked for using deprecated syntax every 18 months.
All in all I am much happier with a clean install - even though it took me hours to reinstall all the apps - I lost media for iWork06 so I went and bought iWork08 and I will need to go buy iLife 08 as well because of lost media - heck I need to upgrade anyways.
Oh yeah - and Time Machine is working - It was easy to exclude my Final Cut Express Documents. It did not work on the first try - but I went to sleep - in the morning all was better. I like that kind of software. I have never really ever backed up my computer until now - thanks Apple.
Really cool trick with Leopard - Drag a directory into the doc and put an image in the directory named aaa-something.gif so it is the first thing in the directory - then the doc will see it and the image will appear on the folder - my rails_apps folder on my dock has the cute rails logo on it using this technique by naming the image aaa-rails.png
I am so loving the Rails and Ruby install on Leopard.
Plaxo still does not work - even with a fresh install of everything. I guess I will just book mark Google calendar on my iPhone and give up using my iPhone's calendar - too bad - Plaxo was sweet while it worked (4 weeks). Plaxo felt like such a Rube Goldberg contraption byways - it is not surprising that the wheels came of on on OS upgrade.
Luckily - Google Calendar has an iPhone view.
I will let the dust settle on calendars - if Spanning Sync releases a 10.5 version - I may just buy - it some things you should pay for to motivate folks to work.
Here is my holiday wish for Apple:
In the migration tool - Allow me to (a) mount disk images and (b) find the place where the old /User's directory is. The current UI is too simple and does not handle the common case - it really wants to back up and restore onto the *same* computer - not an external drive.
Also - we need new operating system releases more often so I don't forget how to upgrade my system in between releases. Next time it will be too long nd I won't even come back and read this blog post. And again I will be whining - but oh well.
Here is my New Years Resolution:
Since I am an AppleSeed Participant - I promise to test the upgrades for the next O/S - this last released I focused on testing the X/Server stuff - next release I will test the desktop stuff as well.
Posted by csev at November 10, 2007 10:45 AM