Mac OS X (Tiger) 10.4 — upgrading from Panther to
Tiger
Living dangerously, I decided to upgrade to Tiger
yesterday, very short on disk space and with no current
backup.
Tiger arrived via UPS yesterday. I had to go to
work, but I knew the upgrade process was likely to be rather slow and
time-consuming on my 600 MHz G3 iMac; so I decided to get it started and let it
run while I was away.Tiger comes on a single DVD. My iMac doesn't have an
internal DVD drive, but I recently purchased an external DVD drive for this
purpose, among others. I inserted the disk in the drive and double-clicked the
installer. It restarted my Mac and booted from the DVD, putting me back into
the installer. The installer told me I didn't have enough free space for a
complete installation, but I was close and it gave me the option of not
installing foreign fonts, support for foreign languages, and printer drivers for
printers I don't have. After removing all those, I had a small amount of extra
space; so the installation continued. It started to verify the DVD itself and I
told it to skip that after a few minutes. Then it began verifying my internal
hard disk in preparation for the installation. At that point I left it and went
to work.
When I got home late last
night my iMac was running Tiger. I checked for automatic upgrades on Apple's
site and there were none. The programmer development system is a separate
installation; so I got that started. Then I started looking at what I had
already gotten.
Almost immediately, the
Finder crashed (all the icons for files on my Desktop disappeared) and I
relaunched it from the Finder Dock icon. A third-party launcher called
Quicksilver crashed and had to be relaunched. Safari crashed. Automator was
almost completely unresponsive to mouse clicks. Mail launched and imported all
my old mail, but refused to get new mail and crashed as soon as I tried to
access any existing mail.
The problem
with Mail was the most serious because it persisted through a relaunch. The
behavior didn't change. It wasn't getting new mail and it crashed as soon as I
tried to access any old mail. I briefly toyed with "resetting" mail, but
quickly realized this meant creating a brand new empty email account and I
didn't want that. I opened Safari and went to Apple's support discussion page
for the new Mail program. There are lots of posts there. I looked for posts
that seemed to be about failing to get new mail and quickly found some. One guy
talked about having to remove a GPG related mail bundle from his
Library/Mail/Bundles folder before Mail would get new mail; another guy talked
about having to remove a different third-party software file. I looked at my
system Library/Mail/Bundles folder and found nothing in it. I looked at my
personal Library/Mail/Bundles folder and found the GPG .mailbundle file there.
I put it in the Trash and relaunched Mail. All the problems had disappeared.
It started retrieving new mail and allowed me to access old mail without
crashing. I would like to have support for PGP signature authentication (which
Apple uses with security updates), but at the moment I'm just happy to be able
to use Mail again.
I'm still
encountering strange behavior occasionally, but at the moment Tiger is running
with no major "life"-threatening problems that I know of. I can browse the web
in Safari, read email vie Mail, manage my financial life with Quicken, run iBlog
to update my weblog, and use iChat to chat with friends.
Posted: Friday - May 06, 2005 at 09:35 AM