Adam Jury

I tried installing Leopard a few weeks ago on my main production machine. The machine needed a reinstall anyway, to clear up over a year’s worth of cruft, so I figured I may as well upgrade to Leopard at the same time. The first week or more was fine, and then InDesign CS2 spontaneously developed a problem — it would crash whenever the “file open/file save/etc” dialog would open. I switched over to using the “Adobe Dialog” for awhile, but that didn’t consistently fix the problem. I did the usual InDesign fixing steps: deleting preferences, making sure the drives didn’t have errors, etc. Deleting prefs would temporarily fix things, but a few hours later the problem would reoccur.

So last night I backed the drive up, reinstalled Leopard, and reinstalled just CS2 and a few other minor essential apps. It worked fine, again, for a few hours … and then it developed the exact same problem.

Leopard has been [mostly] fine and fun on my laptop, but I don’t have time to dicker around with my main production machine. It’s just not ready for my prime time: whether that’s the fault of Apple or Adobe, I don’t care. I’m reinstalling Tiger now.

So, I think I fixed Wacky Leopard Bug #2, or, at least, the symptoms of it. The fix turned out to be simpler than I expected, as I simply had to reset the Keychain according to Apple’s instructions. Honestly, I’m not sure what this did or why the old keychain wouldn’t work, but in this situation, it’s not a big deal: there were few to no passwords saved on the computer. However, it is pretty strange to me that this situation happened during the bog-simple upgrade of the powerbook, which was running a virtually clean install of 10.4.10 before the upgrade.

I updated my old Powerbook [previously running Tiger] to Leopard yesterday. Simple upgrade: backed the entire drive up to the backup partition, dropped Leopard in, ran the Upgrade Mac OS X install, and walked away for an hour and a half while it chugged. It booted up fine, I installed the available software upgrades — Apple, do we really have to download all of iTunes and Quicktime every damned time? — and rebooted again.

Launched Safari, and was presented with a dialog that told me that there was no Keychain file. I told Keychain Access to verify my Keychain, and it told me that the file was missing the extension. Turns out that Safari was right, and there was no keychain file at all. I rooted around in the backup, copied the old Keychain over, and re-ran Keychain first aid; it repaired the keychain, and all seems well now.

Edit on Nov 12: I guess all isn’t fine; the laptop requires the keychain to be unlocked the first time Safari is launched, and creating a new keychain and deleting the old one didn’t seem to fix it. I’ve seen various solutions for this posted on the Apple forums and around the net, and I’ve yet to find one that fixes my exact problem, but I haven’t spent more than 15 minutes or so looking into it.

As with most [all?] Apple products, Leopard had a couple Apple logo stickers in the box. I’ve never used one of these … the products have the logo on it already, and I don’t see the need to plaster Apple logos on other things I own just to show that I’m an Apple Whore.

Instead of the standard Apple stickers, Leopard should have shipped with a couple Time Machine stickers so we could tag our external drives as Time Machines — not only is it practical, but unlike the generic Apple stickers, it helps show others that we’ve updated to Leopard.

Several times an external [USB] hard drive has accidentally become disconnected without ejecting it [wheelychair + loose cord == oops], and both times I end up with two instances of my main hard drive in the Finder [but not on my desktop.] Both of them function just fine, but they don’t go away if you force quit Finder … they stick around until you reboot.

Edit: This seems to be related to the backup/restore method I use [post detailing that coming soon...] — I had a disk image with the same name as my primary hard drive mounted, and that seems to be the cause of the problem. Remounting the drive and the disk image generally fixed things, however the problem didn’t show up consistently.