Airport, keychain, and Time Machine upgrade challenges for Leopard on old hardware
Today, I have three new pieces of Leopard deployment info that might be of interest to others:
Despite these glitches, I'm still loving the Leopard experience overall, especially considering most of my hardware is four to five years old. We'll see how that holds up in the days ahead.
Posted simply (or not so simply today) with the power of Leopard.
- Airport cards not being recognized. This bug bit me this morning when I arrived at work, only to discover I couldn't use our Snow Airport router because Leopard wouldn't recognize the Airport card in my 1GHz G4 PowerBook. You can see how prevalent this problem is in the Apple Support Discussions and Accelerate Your Macintosh has a good set of solutions, including the Apple KBase Document recommending that you start up Leopard in Safe Mode. All that said, I still can't get the Leopard Airport Utility to find our Snow Base station, so I'm glad I have my bootable external drive containing my full Tiger system.
- Upgrading your keychain isn't so simple. I had expected Leopard to upgrade my default keychain of passwords and secure notes in place. It didn't. Instead, it renamed it and gave me a blank keychain to populate again. I cured this easily by going into KeyChain Access and making my old, renamed keychain the default, but it was a surprise to me, because I thought I had answered all the keychain upgrade questions such that this wouldn't be necessary. The good news, though, is that you still can use your old keychain by making it the default, so no harm, no foul.
- Time Machine demands some serious horsepower. I now have a bit more sympathy for Apple requiring at least a 867MHz G4 for Leopard. I did my first Time Machine backup last night on my dual 800 MHz Quicksilver. To back up 201 GBytes, it took about 18 hours to move, index, and compress my 1.4 million files on my home computer. Now this activity wasn't anywhere close to saturating the disk channel, but it did pin my processor load average at anywhere from 2 to 4 for the entire time. During that time, the machine was useless for watching online videos or the like, simply because it was too busy. All that said, it works fine now that the initial backup is done, but clearly Time Machine does demand a lot of your processor performance.
Despite these glitches, I'm still loving the Leopard experience overall, especially considering most of my hardware is four to five years old. We'll see how that holds up in the days ahead.
Posted simply (or not so simply today) with the power of Leopard.
posted by Carl Howe at
10:44 AM
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