Comments on: Upgrade/Cat Scratch Fever

By: ddrucker

ddrucker — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 04:53:43 +0000

Ian - I installed Office and it had no perceptible drag on the system. As for CS2, I installed Photoshop and GoLive (I really do need to get Dreamweaver, as GoLive is now an orphaned product, but I do need at least 1 graphic editor for quick and dirty prototypes). Again, no big drag on the system yet. So far, the only big gap is I haven’t been able to get my calendars back. .Mac syncing is just not working, so I am going to look to my laptop for that piece (that’s how I got my contacts - one big mass export).

Thanks for the offer re Ubuntu. I’d be interested to see how far it’s come along, and what kind of tweaking could be done to make it more like a product that I’d like.

Anne - Strange stuff with the firewire! As for the dirty install disk, yes, I told it to skip the media check the third time around (I figured if the first 2 scans came up with no problems, it wasn’t worth doing yet again). Glad to see you like Leopard. It’s definitely growing on me. If nothing else, it made me clean up my System and App folders.

By: Ian King

Ian King — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 01:18:54 +0000

Dunno about how much installing Office would slow down a system, but I found that CS2 (with Version Cue running fulltime, and apps open as necessary) did not drag down the G5 iMac at my then-workplace. A lot of accessories could do the job, though. Reminds me too much of TSR worries back in the DOS days for comfort. How we’ve progressed!

If you find yourself free to muck with Ubuntu sometime, give me a shout — your observations would be *really* interesting. (As an aside, Ubuntu has defaulted to a plane/slide viewport switcher instead of the cube, but it’s easy enough to experiment with the dozens of switchers and effects that are out there.)

By: Anne

Anne — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 01:10:45 +0000

I had trouble with my Leopard install until I unplugged my firewire cable. Oh, and before that, it kept whining about a dirty install disk (which made no sense), so I told it to quit looking for dirt, then. Ta-da!

Otherwise, it worked like a dream. I do like Leopard.

By: ddrucker

ddrucker — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 23:28:02 +0000

I would love to try out a box with Ubuntu, just to play around with it (something else to do with my copious free time these days). Running that cubic Desktop switcher, as well as some of the other toys and tweaks would be a lot of fun.

In the meantime, I feel like I’m going to slow my nice, fast, new system down by loading on baggage like CS2 and MS Office. Maybe I can do a partial install, skipping over inDesign and Illustrator, which I’ve probably used a total of 3 times each in the past 2 years.

By: Ian King

Ian King — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 21:50:11 +0000

Ouch! As it was, I was going to delay upgrading my Mac to Leopard for a few months. One of my current projects involves a bunch of Acrobat-related work. Adobe projects that Acrobat’s Leopard compatibility update won’t be ready until January, and I didn’t want to risk running into snags. While I don’t run any haxies on my Mac, I think Apple should compensate for the widely-used ones in their upgrade programs — whether blessed by Apple or not, it is how their machines are used in the read world.

Did a virgin install of Ubuntu Gutsy on my desktop box last month. (I’d been running a bunch of experimental software, so it was time to start clean. For normal users, the upgrade would have been fine.) It took about 35 minutes, including a round of partition-tweaking that wasn’t strictly necessary. Everything was detected correctly, even graphics and printing. Follow up with a sudo apt-get install [pre-prepared list of stuff I gotta have], hit the sack and let it run. Not much else to say about it, really.