Back in Mac

Posted bysandro 6 Comments on Back in Mac

MacBook ProMy MacBook Pro came back from service last week, and I’m fully operational again. During the week it was gone, I was limping along on a spare laptop running Ubuntu Linux. I’ve needed to send my MBP in for minor service for about 9 months, but there was never a good time. I finally decided that no time would be good, but I wanted to beat the post-Christmas/pre-Macworld rush at Apple Service, so I would just bite the bullet.

Before sending in the mac, I took the time to:

  1. Backup the entire hard drive
  2. Configure Ubuntu Linux with the tools I’d need for up to a month without the mac.
  3. Reformat the mac’s internal drive (I didn’t want my personal data in other people’s hands
  4. Upgraded the MBP to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

I had been meaning to shift to Leopard for a while, but didn’t want to take the 24-48 hour downtime for my normal upgrade rituals.

During the week the mac was in the shop, I felt like I had lost an arm. The Linux box let me get by with my day to day activities, but it wasn’t pleasant. In a word, the experience of living with an Ubuntu system as my sole computing platform isn’t acceptable, and I wouldn’t recommend it to any long-time mac user. Much of the high-level functionality of the computer works well (despite being somewhat clunky), but basic low-level functionality is broken. My laptop never: slept, woke-up, or shutdown properly, and power-consumption was off the charts. While most of the application programs did what I needed, I can say the Mozilla Thunderbird isn’t a mail program I would use everyday, and it’s a miserable RSS reader.

After just one week (which included a week-end and Christmas Day), I got my Mac back. It now has a new screen, new DVD superdrive, and four small rubber feet on the bottom. Immediately jumped in and went through an entire rebuild of my software environment in Leopard. I downloaded, re-installed, and patched every program to the latest levels. I also took the time to drop some programs from my standard set (Yahoo! Widget Engine), and added others (iClip). The vast majority of the upgrade time was spent tracking down current license numbers for all the software I’ve bought (mostly though MacHeist and MacUpdate Promo). After 3 days of installing and patching, everything is up and running. Leopard seems faster, although I’ve found some minor bugs and annoyances.

All in all, it’s good to have the mac back. Kind of like coming home.

6 replies on “Back in Mac”

  1. I am also making the transition to Leopard. I simply replaced a dual 500MHz G4 tower with a 20″ iMac, and that has proven trickier and more complex than simply upgrading from Tiger (Erci’s experience on her MacBookPro). Turns out that all the little notes in my address book get dropped with a vcard export and import into AddressBook… and .Mac does not work with Panther anymore (bastards), which is what my G4 was running.

    Also, Leopard breaks plucker desktop python fetch scripts… so I am still jumping back and forth between two computers until I hand copy in all the data from my Address Book and figure out the plucker bug… sigh. In general I like Leopard though.

  2. I am also making the transition to Leopard. I simply replaced a dual 500MHz G4 tower with a 20″ iMac, and that has proven trickier and more complex than simply upgrading from Tiger (Erci’s experience on her MacBookPro). Turns out that all the little notes in my address book get dropped with a vcard export and import into AddressBook… and .Mac does not work with Panther anymore (bastards), which is what my G4 was running.

    Also, Leopard breaks plucker desktop python fetch scripts… so I am still jumping back and forth between two computers until I hand copy in all the data from my Address Book and figure out the plucker bug… sigh. In general I like Leopard though.

  5. The Plucker issue is the following:
    Plucker Mac OS is broken in Leopard.
    This is due to a post 2.3 change in Python which seems to require encoding declarations.

    This is explained in http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/
    “Defining Python Source Code Encodings”.

    This can be solved by simply going to:

    Plucker.app/Contents/Resources/parser/python/

    and, for each Python (.py) source file here, adding as first or second (if a #! line is the first one) line:

    # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

    I have done this on my version for only the files that triggered errors (around 5 files) and it works fine for what I have to do.

  6. The Plucker issue is the following:
    Plucker Mac OS is broken in Leopard.
    This is due to a post 2.3 change in Python which seems to require encoding declarations.

    This is explained in http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/
    “Defining Python Source Code Encodings”.

    This can be solved by simply going to:

    Plucker.app/Contents/Resources/parser/python/

    and, for each Python (.py) source file here, adding as first or second (if a #! line is the first one) line:

    # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

    I have done this on my version for only the files that triggered errors (around 5 files) and it works fine for what I have to do.

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