Put a Leopard in your tank

All but my fellow Mac bigots can skip the rest of this post. I upgraded my Mac to OS X 10.5 today and had a few observations.

One is that the branding of the software package says “Leopard” with “10.5” in smaller print. I didn’t get the sense that this was true with Tiger (10.4), so I guess Apple has concluded that using the code name to build buzz beforehand creates a brand that’s worth using after launch.

10.5 has brought some fawning reviews but also a few noting the key omissions (notably Classic). Today’s immediate problem was the loss of NetInfo Manager.

Without NetInfo Manager, I had to solve two problems:

• Enabling root access, using the new “Directory Utility” program.
• Moving my home directory — I have multiple System partitions on different volumes, but share the same user directory across these systems. The answer is to use the dscl command to map the user directories.

In our printer driver days, we used to have multiple system configurations installed (it was much easier under OS 7.x-9.x). Still, my former coworkers thought I was nuts to set up multiple configurations on my laptop — in this case, two versions of OS X and one with OS 9.

It turns out it’s already paid for itself. When my 10.4 partition died 6 weeks ago en route to the airport, I switched my 5-year-old laptop back to OS 9.2.2 and then 10.2.8. Rather than drop everything to salvage the 10.4 partition, I decided to wait until I could do a clean install of 10.5, which turned out to be painless (other than the $70 purchase price).

Much as I like Apple’s stuff, they can’t make the hard disk more reliable. And this little episode had a good side-effect: I bought an up-to-date copy of Disk Warrior, which worked like a charm. Even my wife (Palomar’s then project manager and procurement officer) remembered how the product bailed us out of jams in the pre-OS X days. It’s a good insurance policy to have on hand.