Installing Tiger

[bryanthompson]

I'm going to get my copy of Tiger tomorrow. Does anyone know if they offer student or educational versions at any of the popular chain stores? I'm not too thrilled about spending $129 to become an Apple beta tester, since apparently they didn't test Tiger. At all.

My boss installed on his g5 iMac and newest generation 12" powerbook and has had nothing but problems. The only machine that works well with it is the g5x2 xserve, which was a fresh install with no migration.

So... to avoid those problems I'm going to run Tiger on a 30 gig 2.5" firewire drive for awhile.

Any other pelicans running Tiger? Anything in particular I need to look out for before installing? This is supposed to be an easy process, hopefully it works like it should.

[targa911S]

Not yet, but I did what you are thinking of doing when I bought Jaguar. Running on a sep HD is the hot setup. Let us know how it turns out you beta tester!

[bryanthompson]

Hopefully it goes well... Thursday I leave for WWDC in San Francisco, hopefully it's at least *running* so I can participate in some of the seminars and whatnot.

It's sad that the acceptable level of quality has fallen so far (looks in Microsoft's direction) that it's okay to release something buggy enough to require users to go out of their way to make it work. It's just wrong.

[id10t]

Strange, I updated my iMac at home... a few simple commands

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

No issues... fortunately Debian does test their releases before sending them out... and no $129 either

[wludavid]

I've decided not to be on the edge for this release. Panther is serving me well. I'll probably upgrade when they get to 10.4.2 or so. The widgets didn't seem that exciting.

I'm not sure if you can get educational discounts at the brick-and-mortar stores, but there are steep discounts through apple.com.

[jyl]

I installed Tiger on my G5 iMac (upgrade from Panther) with no issues, and have been using it daily with no issues.

I do have 2GB RAM, but it was running fine with the original 256MB too.

[dd74]

Whether tested or not - and I find it hard to believe Apple would release non-tested software - isn't it just sound practical advice to wait for a later version of anything hardware or software related to come out before buying and using it?

[bryanthompson]

That should be the way it works, but it isn't anymore. Deadlines were set months and months ago, so they had to release it in the best shape they could, then patch as they go.

If i didn't have to upgrade, I wouldn't at this point. Not until it was totally stable, at least.

John, did you just install on top of panther, or did you back up, clean, install, and migrate?

[motion]

I installed it on my G5 Mac within a few days of it becoming available. Safari is much snappier, which I'm very happy about... but, I am getting a lot of freezes. Sometimes a few a day. Totally unacceptable. I hope they have a fix soon.

[stomachmonkey]

I installed on top of Panther and it just sat there on reboot. Used the "Upgrade" option. Re-installed a couple of times and same deal.

Final install I used the "create new system/archive old system" option.

Worked fine.

Have had no issues in 3 weeks.

Observations: USB file copies from things like thumbdrives and cameras is significantly faster.

Spotlight takes FOREVER to index, recommend doing upgrade late in the day so it can index overnight. Indexing on external drives is a bit cumbersome. Otherwise works very well. If you do a lot of graphics stuff you'll want to change default "command + spacebar" to F11 or F12 to invoke spotlight. Otherwise everytime you go for the magnify tool you'll get spotlight instead.

Dashboard is cute but you can live without it.

Menu bar has lost the Aqua look, looks like the menu bar from the "Milk" theme. I like it better.

Mail is improved.

Check out enabling Quartz, cool if your box is supported.
http://earthlingsoft.net/ssp/blog/2004/01/quartz_debug
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/14

Running on a G4 1.5 mhz 17 inch with Hitachi 7200 RPM drive and 1 gb of RAM and the wifes 15 inch Ti-book.

[nostatic]

i've got it running on one of my G5 desktops and a 12" powerbook (came installed on it). The G5 was an upgrade from 10.3.9. No problems to speak of. The only annoyance is that Entourage now takes forever to hit the network updating the calendar. Sucks. Mail is OK, but they didn't fix the search the way I wanted them too. Spotlight does take awhile to index, but once done it is very fast, although some of the views give me fits. 10.4.1 is already out and 10.4.2 is seeded to developers as we speak. I wouldn't say Tiger wasn't tested...that just isn't the case. Whether it was tested enough is up for discussion, but NO software is shipped perfect. Period.

[techweenie]

I just did a straight install. No problems whatsoever (G4 PB). Updated to 10.4.1 and started seeing Safari freeze up occasionally.

Also 4.8 iTunes does not want you to have your iPod plugged in when opening or closing the program.

That's pretty much the extent of it. As with any OSX action, 'repair permissions' just before making a change.

10.4.2 is in testing now. The very cautious may want to wait for 10.4.3.

[jyl]

I just did an upgrade on top of Panther. Mind you, the G5 iMac was brand new. It was a refurb from the "special deals" part of the Apple.com store, so it came with Panther pre-loaded and a Tiger upgrade DVD. I plugged the Mac in, booted up in Panther, and installed the Tiger upgrade, before migrating my old apps/data/etc from the old iBook.

So even though it wasn't a back-up/clean install, it was the "cleanest" possible upgrade - none of that pesky user stuff in the way.

But I've had no crashes, freezes, or other reliability issues whatsoever with Tiger.

I find the widgets pretty useful. I haven't used Spotlight much yet.

I do have a short list of complaints, though. iSync is finally useful enough that I bought .Mac, but it would be really useful if it also sync'd mailboxes in Mail, and I don't see why that would be too hard. The process of printing photos from iPhoto could be improved.