Leopard Upgrade Experience / Issues

I have had some problems with my Leopard upgrade on my Desktop. I did this from my 9A581 disks which are claimed to be clones of the released software (which I believe to be true).


If your Home directory is under a different partition in Mac OS/X
I have my home directory on a separate partition /Volumes/UserHome/Users/csev – I wonder how much of my problems are related to that. It is funny that part of the reason to do the external home directory is to make upgrades easier – hmmm.
After the upgrade, when I logged in for the first time I had an empty Desktop, etc. I finally fixed it below – some damage was done to my configuration in the process – to give you the best chance of success if you keep your home directory on a separate partition – I would try the steps below.
Before your Leopard upgrade, make another admin account on the local drive. After the upgrade – do not log into your normal account – instead log into this other account using your fresh admin user. Then use System Preferences -> Accounts -> (Unlock) -> Control-Click on the User and bring up Advanced Options -> Change the Home Directory to the new place -> Like /Volume/UserHome/Users/csev – save the account then logout of the admin account and log into the account on the external partition. Some other folks might figure out how to ditto the /Users resource fork so all new accounts are made on the partition – but since the niutil command is gone – all the mojo that used to work – no longer works. – this is your best chance for success as best I can tell.
If you are reading this blog *after* you did an upgrade and encountered a problem like I did – well – the process works – and I even did it to my account from the account I was logged in. The above process will let you get to the point where you can log in and see your desktop and then start fixing the broken bits.
The rest of these issues *may* be related to my rocky start finding my home directory.
Lots of little things the I know are because logging in before fixing home directory
These are not Leopard’s fault – things just got messed up because I logged in before fixing my home directory. If you follow the above procedure, you should not encounter these problems – because I did this with another account (pointing the account to the right home before logging into the account) and saw none of these problems.

  • Lost my dock application settings
  • Lost my background
  • Lost my screen resolution

There may be others – little things seem to vanish if you log in and have your home directory pointed wrongly.
Leopard Conversion Problems – Mail
After I got my home directory reconnected and logged in and ran mail, A dialog popped up to convert my account – I said “yes” – seemed to work. A few glitches so far:
For my main account – the conversion lost my outbound mail server could not send mail immediately after the upgrade. Easy to fix in the settings. It is funny that it remembered where to send the mail – it was just not selected.
All of my 4GB of locally stored mail boxes appeared to exist by had no messages – panic – Thankfully doing a rebuild fixes this. Funny how a complete copy of all your mail on Gmail makes one more relaxed about these things. I think that everyone should have several copies of their whole mail corpus. I wish Apple mail had a rebuild all mailboxes.
Lost my second mail account (Comcast) – no big deal – I just had to re-add it. On Comcast, I had some trouble getting it to “get mail” – it still refuses to retrieve any “old mail” that had already been viewed. But it did get new mail that arrived after the conversion. Since this is low-volume – no big deal for me.
I used “automatically configure” account feature to add my Comcast account – pretty slick.
One neat feature is that in the control panel it knows the link to some help inside of Comcast. This new documentation made it so my iPhone can actually send mail to Comcast (unrelated to Leopard)
http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=EmailMail_(Mac)18530
Leopard Conversion Problems – Calendar / Plaxo
My Calendar is lost/empty Plaxo seems unable to refill it. Still working on this one.
http://forums.plaxo.com/showthread.php?p=12671
I am going to suppose for the moment that this is a Plaxo problem – I have reinstalled Plaxo a bunch of times – still no luck. I will just sit and wait – thankfully Google Calendar and Plaxo and my iPhone all seem to have perfect copies of my calendar for now. Synchronization is just broken.