Remember? The famous Blue Screen Of Death many of us had when updating from Tiger to Leopard?
Well after a few hours, we knew the reason was the Application Enhancer and you all remember the famous tutorial.

I wrote a blog post a few days before Leopard came out, giving many advices to users who were (worried) about to make an upgrade from Tiger(10.4) to Leopard (10.5), the same advices apply for the Leopard to Snow Leopard transition.

Apple’s OS X installers traditionally come with 3 options (archive and install …) but with Snow Leopard, there will be a single default kind of installation (Archive & Install) meaning “fresh OS”.

The installer is complicated as it used: insert disc, open installer, type password and go. The installer first quarantines incompatible apps and plugins in an “Incompatible Software” folder, but it will be better (on my opinion) to clean up your system a bit before installing Snow Leopard by removing tweaks, mods, input managers and plugins.

You may also take a look at this Snow Leopard compatibility listing.

For example, on my system, I decided to delete Growl (the uninstaller script is in the installer’s disk image), Chax (installer comes with a remove option), Google Gears, Flip 4 Mac, and many other utilities that adds plugins or modify OS X’s default application/system.
I’m not meaning these applications are not supported by Snow Leopard.
This post is just a set of advices for the paranoid ones like myself.

Another solution (takes a lot of time) is to reinstall a fresh copy of Leopard and then upgrade it to Snow Leopard.

Before starting the installer it would be better to unplug/unmount any external device plugged to your Macs (you can keep the mouse and keyboard of course).

Updated to OS 10.5.8 through the combo update? You may get a lot of permissions repaired every time you run disk utility. Some of them are “scaring” I must admit…
That’s the reason why I made some investigations to find a solution on how to fix them.
And the solution is easy but annoying: install the combo update twice in a row with no permission repairs in between.
Worked great on my Macs.

Apple released the next — and potentially last — upgrade to its Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system Wednesday afternoon, bringing minor tweaks before the debut of Snow Leopard in September.

The latest update to Leopard includes security fixes, improves Bluetooth reliability, and upgrades Safari to version 4.0.2. It is available for Mac users via software update, or a 274MB file for download from Apple. The combo update is also available at 759MB.

“The Mac OS X v10.5.8 Update is recommended for Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard users and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility and security of your Mac,” reads an Apple statement.

The list of fixes for Leopard are as follows:

Read the rest of this entry »

Just wanted to share with you a strange thing I’ve just noticed in my Mac OS 10.5.7’s Finder.
When I go to the “about finder”, here is what I got:

Usually I get the same version as OS X or a previous one…

Here’s the easy to use and powerful tool that many OS users are looking for: FDF (Find Duplicate Files) for Leopard.
The aim of this application is to find duplicates on any Leopard based Macintosh computer, as you can see in the screenshot below, the application is very simple, what you can’t see is how fast it is:

In this screenshot, I asked FDF to look for duplicates in my iDisk and it found 9,084 duplicates on a total of 22,724 files scanned!! I’m very paranoid in my backups through my iDisk it seems

Finding duplicates with this amazing application can be done in 2 steps:
Step 1, click on the + and select the folder(s) (or drive(s)) you want it to fetch for duplicates in,
Step 2, click on the “find duplicates” button.

It is that easy! I saved approximatively a GB of disk space thanks to this application and of course got rid of many duplicate files.
You can give it a try by downloading a 7 days free version of FDF from Araxis website.

Here’s the Terminal command you can copy and paste in a new Terminal window to get back the previous progress bar right into the latest version of Safari (4 beta) then you’ll know the percentage of the page loaded:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign -bool NO
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle -bool NO
killall Safari & open -a Safari

The new keyboards lost their Apple button (command) but they come with some new ones like the F3 shortcut button (before we used to use F9 to F11 for the three exposé modes), here are the new shortcuts:

• Control-F3: Current application windows mode
• Command-F3: Show desktop mode
• Option-F3: Opens the Exposé & Spaces System Preferences panel.

This is due to the fact some drivers are missing.

To solve this problem (and some keyboard functions including ejecting a disk), all you have to do is:

1. Boot on Bootcamp
2. Insert Leopard’s DVD once Vista started
3. This will automatically begin installation of the Boot Camp 2.0 drivers