Twice since installing Leopard on my G5 it's not gone to sleep on demand. Instead it goes into a coma and starts snoring. By that I mean all the USB devices shut off, the video signal goes away but the computer doesn't quite sleep. Instead, all the fans start to spin up. For anyone that's never heard a G5's fans go nuts... it's like a small jet engine. The only recourse is a hard restart. I installed the first Leopard update and it hasn't repeated this stunt but I'm keeping an eye on it just in case.
The second thing is that MySQL won't start. I've read a few things on the Internet and it just doesn't look the MySQL project is ready for Leopard. They had bug reports before 10.5 shipped but decided to just wait until it went gold. I guess I'll just have to patiently wait for an update. No biggie. I'll just use the built-in SQLite instead.
The third thing that I wasn't prepared for was the retirement of Classic OS 9 support. I don't personally use any OS 9 apps but my kids used to play the occasional game. Sorry Rolly McFly. Your days are over.
The last thing that isn't too big of a problem but a big disappointment is that the Java 6 SDK is MIA. I guess I never really saw official mention of it, but I really expected Java 6 to ship with Leopard. C'mon Apple! I was there when Steve Jobs and Avie Tevanian stood up at JavaOne and said they'd have the best Java implementation on any platform. You're definitely letting me down on this one.
Now onto the good news. Everything else just works! Mail is cool. Safari is blazingly fast. Dropped network connections don't mean a frozen finder anymore. Quick Look is sweet. And Ruby is built-in. I just deleted my old custom Ruby installation and everything (other than MySQL) continues to work. My IDEs function properly (Eclipse & NetBeans) and despite the lack of Java 6, Java 5 on my Mac is still noticeably faster than Java 5 on Windows at work. I don't mind the translucent menu bar and Cover Flow in the finder is nice but mostly unnecessary for me.
The biggest shock to the system was the developer tools. I've built the occasional Mac app, and while I'm no wizard at it, I got along just fine thanks. So naturally I wanted to try the Ruby/Cocoa integration. Then I opened Interface Builder. Yikes! That certainly got a major overhaul! Looks better, but now I see that I need to spend some time trying to figure out what's what.
So if someone asks whether they should upgrade or not. I'd definitely give it the thumbs up. Just make sure you don't need classic and if you're a geek like me, be prepared for a little bit of adjustment to the changes under that spiffy new exterior.
2 comments:
I've had the sleep problem a couple of times now my G5. Very annoying, and I've not seen any posts for a real fix. What issues are you having with mysql? I build Rails apps that rely on mysql, and have had no issues with mysql at all.
I think I have a permissions issue with the MySQL directories. If I add myself to the list of users to /usr/local/mysql-standard[...] with read/write privs I can use the prefs pane to start the app again. Unfortunately I don't know what the "proper" privs were before I upgraded to Leopard. I assume I was running it with a service account but I can't be sure of that.
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