Migrating my MacBook to Leopard was a pretty straightforward process... for the most part. But as with all cases of early software adoption, weirdness abounds. Here's some help to avoid at least some of that weirdness.

I ordered a family pack of Leopard to upgrade my family of Macs: a MacBook, a G5 iMac, and a pre-Intel (G4) Mac Mini. Since Celia's been using the iMac for music homework, and since the Mac Mini is now our home server (to which I just attached a new Iomega MiniMax hard drive for backups), I figured the best place to start with a Leopard upgrade was my MacBook. It's the newest machine (one year old almost to the very day I did the upgrade) and it seemed an upgrade would go smoother there than on the older machines. For the most part, this was true. But as always when you install brand new software on a computer, there are bound to be problems.

The install went very smoothly, and quickly. The Installer's estimates of how long the process would take were conservative: what it claimed would take two or three hours took about one. As the end of the process approached, though, the estimates of how much time was left became first more accurate, then too optimistic. "3 hours left" at the beginning of the process meant an hour, but "7 minutes left" meant closer to fifteen. I expect that these estimates are meant to be conservative and take older hardware into account, so I'll see how long the process takes on the other Macs in the house.

However, at the very end of the whole process (and I'm sorry I didn't take better notes on what happened), the Installer displayed a dialog box mentioning something about "saving boot information", and that I should please wait. I did... for over fifteen minutes, while the MacBook sat there, screen black, power-on indicator light on, but nothing happening. Knowing I might regret this, I finally held down the power key and turned it off. When I turned it back on, everything seemed fine.

And for the most part it was fine. My hidden encrypted wireless network was stubborn about being remembered by the system, but pushing the entry in explicitly in the Network Preferences pane did the trick and now I get connected without manual intervention. Parallels Desktop worked, although it did not mount the virtual "C:" drive on my desktop the way it used, and I lost the desktop icon for UltraEdit in the transition. (UltraEdit is there, just has a blank icon instead of the well-known "UE" logo.) Microsoft Office programs worked reasonably. My AFP shares defined on the server with SharePoint still connected.

But there was a nagging annoying problem that at first seemed innocuous, then weird, then scary. I noticed that when I shut down, the MacBook would not boot back up. Uh oh, I thought, I've bricked my MacBook. But holding down the power key, then pressing it again, turned the machine on. Of course, I got a crash report warning when the restart completed, but this seemed to be just a glitch... until it happened again... and again... and then regularly with every shutdown.

I thought I'd pinned the problem down, or at least isolated it, when I noticed that closing the lid after shutdown caused the little power indicator light to come on. Huh? It's off, why does it say it's on? Opening the lid would get rid of the light, but it would come back again when the lid was closed. (I eventually noticed that the lid's position really didn't have much to do with it at all.)

Finally, I looked to Google for answers. Sure enough, people had noticed weird problems not unlike those I was experiencing, associated with DoubleCommand, a utility for key remapping in OS X. Seems the old version of DoubleCommand was causing a kernel panic on restart... or something. My problem seemed different (more like "restarting by itself on shutdown but not really") but I figured it was worth a try. Sure enough, removing DoubleCommand (by trashing "/Library/PreferencePanes/DoubleCommandPreferences.prefPane" and "/Library/StartupItems/DoubleCommand") did the trick. Turns out there is a new beta version of DoubleCommand that seems to work fine in Leopard without causing this weird behavior.

Since then, things have been reasonable. Now that I've gotten past this hurdle (which seems to have been the worst of my problems with the upgrade, I'll devote my next post to reviewing and assessing the new features, the changes, the updated look-and-feel, and the compatibility issues. The moral of the story is: check compatibility before you upgrade of not just the big things but the little things, too.