Trading two goats for a leopard

Having traded two goats for a Leopard upgrade DVD last weekend, I’ve been a bit tardy in getting around to sharing how the upgrade process went.

The Mac Mini was new in September – and I’m still a bit annoyed that Apple feel they can refresh their hardware range in September (which inspired the purchase) and then upgrade the operating system the next month but only give cheap upgrades to hardware purchases made in October.

Having never quite needed to hack at the command line or install anything more fancy that Office 2004, I expected the upgrade process to be smooth. After all, if Apple can’t test that the Leopard upgrades on a basic out-of-the-box Tiger system, what hope have they for more complicated setups?

It took a good hour: the first 30 minutes for the install process to check the integrity of the DVD – felt like it was polishing each bit of data on the DVD – before actually installing the software.

Smooth as the fur on a seasonal Sainsburys’ Polar Bear!

The mistake was then clicking on the (now black not blue) Apple logo to check for Software Upgrades. I assumed correctly that a few patches would have been issued since the upgrade DVDs were burned. And so three patches were downloaded.

The third patch – Login & Keychain Update 1.0 – seems to be the problem patch. It was all ok until the machine restarted, and it got stuck on the way down.

Updating Boot Caches

Caches necessary for booting are being updated. System shutdown will proceed once the caches are up to date.

I waited 10 minutes. I Googled the error message on the still-operational PC for the next ten minutes, satisfied myself that it seemed like a common problem, and held in the power button for the necessary five seconds.

Since then, the machine’s been stable, but I’ve noticed a couple of post-Leopard changes:

• On boot, or coming out of sleep, it finds it hard to detect the Bluetooth keyboard. Was never a problem with under Tiger.
• It’s a little more sluggish – a bit like Vista, XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98, each new OS release seems a bit more bloated (at least in terms of video and memory processing requirements) and slower.