Mac OS X Leopard
I’m using a MacBook Pro laptop as my primary development platform for work. The project has sprung for the OS upgrade to the new-ish release of Mac OS X, version 10.5.1, or “Leopard”.
So today I identified a hard disk I could erase, plugged it into an external USB case, hooked that up to the laptop, and cleared enough free space to accommodate the upgrade process. I checked “Software Update” and got the 10.4 install up to date. After a reboot, I started the upgrade. It restarted again and began the process. I left the whole thing on its own for a couple of hours. When I came back to it, I had a login prompt. It stepped through a wizard-style process for registering the upgrade, then rebooted one more time. At that point, I was back to usual laptop function, but now with Leopard running the show. Xcode is OS version specific, so that had to be installed from the DVD, too. There were optional updates for the standard Mac applications, so I installed those, too.
All in all, the indications are that it was a pretty smooth in-place upgrade.
I’ll have to see have my experience holds up following that. I certainly wouldn’t do that with Windows; whenever I do a Windows install, I take things down to a new partitioning and clean install.
Sounds like a normal Linux upgrade, though.
I don’t know about that… when I tried to upgrade Xubuntu to the “Gutsy Gibbon” release on my laptop, I did run into a problem and had to reinstall from scratch. I keep getting the “it’s not quite there” feeling from various Linux distros, and I’ve been a cheerleader for Linux since 1993, when I first put a distribution set of files on my dial-up bulletin board.
My servers run FreeBSD, but my usual upgrade path there usually involves a change of hard drive to larger capacity, so I also usually just make a fresh install on the new drive.
My “gnuplot” intallation was a casualty of the upgrade. “gri” seems to have passed through the upgrade unscathed.
I’m doing updates on both MacPorts and Fink to see if I can get a path back to reinstallation of gnuplot. There seems to be some library confusion in the wake of the upgrade.
I tracked down the problem to an invalid “/usr/local/lib” symbolic link: it linked back to itself, meaning that nothing that needed a library out of /usr/local/lib could run. That included gnuplot.
A few seconds of Googling and following links got me to this page, which confirmed the course of action I was leaning towards anyway. This is an apparent bug in the Leopard upgrade process.