If you are wanting to hear all the nice things about Mac OS X 10.5 and how easy it is to install, just read my previous blog, “My Experience Upgrading From Mac OS X Tiger to Mac OS X Leopard“.

In this blog entry, I’m only concentrating on issues I had, I’m having and will have as I start using my new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard machine. So don’t expect “Ohhh…..everything is great…..I love Apple…Apple does everything perfect”. They don’t make everything perfect (though, it is better then Windows….and I work on both Mac and Windows). So here we go. Read below for the reality you may run into when upgrading your machine to the new Mac OS X 10.5. If you had other issues that have not been documented here, please feel free to contact me and tell me what they are. I will add them to this blog entry as the issues grow (hopefully, not too many).

Printers/Printing

1. Samsung ML-2510 - Ah…can you say goodbye! I can’t print. The printer driver was no longer there. And now, I try to connect to it and it won’t. My printer is connected to a wireless station, and I used to connect to that station via Apple Talk. I can still connect via Apple Talk, and when I click on “Print”, my printer start running, but nothing prints. I’m pissed! That’s a big issue if you ask me! I need to do more research on this. Update: Fixed the issue. I just did a search for “Samsung ML-2510 Mac OS X Driver” and found it here. Downloaded the driver, installed it and then added the printer as an AppleTalk printer and I’m back on track! Yeah!
2. Printer Queue Stays In Dock - How anoying. Every time I print something, the Printer Queue now stays in the dock. Before it would just appear and when done printing, it would disappear.

Network Drives

1. My network drives disappeared. I have a network hard drive and I used to have shortcuts that when I booted up, they would show up on my desktop. They disappeared. I then figured out that they now are located in the Finder under the “Shared” category. Thats ok. Not a problem. In fact, I hated having them on my desktop, but before, that’s the place 10.4.10 place it.
2. My network drive password had to be added to the password key chain. When I tried to connect to my network drives, it asked me for the password and asked if I wanted to add the password to my keyc hain. Not a big deal, but I already had them in my key chain prior to the upgrade.

Pro Apps

1. Final Cut Pro 6 - For some reason, it took forever to give me back control. Let me explain what I mean. The application started up really quickly, but then when it got to “Optimizing For Video”, it got stuck and stuck and stuck. I forced quit twice. To debug, I unplugged my second monitor. That didn’t do it. I then unplugged my fire wire cable which is connected to my ADVC110 Capture box and that didn’t do it. Then by the fourth try I decided to let it go as long as it wanted to do do what ever it was doing (I had the rainbow circle of death). After maybe 5 to 7 minutes, it came back. Then everything was ok. Not sure if it’s just me being impatient, but something happened or something needed to get initialized with the new operating system. Now it works fine. Just like before. Update: A reader (Erick Veland) from Newsvine.com posted in my blog there that a possible issue for this may be FXFactor Pro plug in set. Can’t verify this, but try uninstalling it if you have many problems with FCP after the update to Leopard.
2. Motion 3 - Same problem as Final Cut Pro 6 above. Now it works fine.

iLife / iWorks /.Mac

1. Mail -
   1. It will ask you to upgrade your mail accounts before using it.
   2. There seems to be a bug (at least, it seems like a bug to me) with the RSS feeds.  I have lots of them.   Under the RSS preferences there is an option to remove articles after a certain amount of time or manually.   I had it to remove it after 1 week, but I also manually delete them as I read them.  Well, if the preference is set to anything except “manually”, then even if you delete them from your RSS feed after you read them, you will get them back.    Not sure why.  It should not work like that.  I went ahead and changed the preference to “manually” and then it worked as I expected it to work.
2. iCal - This is not an issue, actually, it’s a fix in Leopard. Let me explain. My wife uses Outlook 2003 on Windows Vista (at home) and I use iCal. Before (in Tiger) I used to send her iCal events and she could not read them. I, on the other hand, could read her Outlook events. Well, we just tried it (we share events for the house) and she can now easily read my events, accept them, deny them and I get the responses. This is good! Full collaboration between Office & iLife! Life’s good!
3. iSync - When you sync up your mail through iMac, you will get duplicate “On My Mac”s. The easy fix (after researching through Apple’s support forums) is to just drag the topmost “On My Mac” all the way down and then let go. They will all become one. Not sure why it does that, but I’m hoping Apple will fix it soon.

Parallels

1. Slower performance - Parallels seems to be a bit slower performance wise. Not sure if I’m being extra paranoid since I just upgraded my system, but it does seem a bit slower.
2. Win XP HD Won’t Mount - It does not want to mount the Windows XP hard drive. Parallels has acknowledge this and it’s working on a fix.

New Leopard Features

1. Spaces, Dual Monitors and Parallels don’t mix. I was trying out spaces in a dual monitor setting while running Parallels 3 in Coherence mode. Spaces went wild. I mean my apps started jumping from monitor to monitor. It was almost cool, but not really.
2. “Do You Want To Run This Application?” - I’m getting, in certain applications that run the first time, a “This is the first time you are running this application, continue?”. I never ran into anything like that before the upgrade. It only asks me that one time. I thought it was really funny to see this message since it reminded me a lot of Vista (and the Mac vs. PC commercials).

Other Issues/Notes

1. Force Quit Won’t Quit Sometimes. Some programs won’t force quit after the upgrade (if they hang up). I thought this was only a Windows thing!
2. Crashes - I had my machine give me the “black screen of death” around 3 times since I installed Leopard. That’s not good.

So keep coming back to this blog entry to read what works and what didn’t. Hopefully, this will help you solve any issues you may have during your upgrade. Also, if you had any issues you would like to share with the world, please contact me and tell me what they are and I will add them to this blog entry

Good luck with you upgrade and most of all, have fun!

Cheers!

- Marcelo

The Digital Media Dude