Installation and Upgrading
I installed Snow Leopard on a three-year-old quad-core Xeon Woodcrest Mac Pro, and a 15-month-old basic MacBook. Not exactly the latest and greatest hardware, but in both cases EFI reported a 64-bit system.
On the MacBook, I nominated to keep the Leopard partition intact, and reformat a Boot Camp Windows partition for Snow Leopard. I was a bit surprised to find I couldn't format this from inside the Installer - I needed to quit the Installer and run Disk Utility manually. But otherwise it was plain sailing. On the Mac Pro, I performed an in-place upgrade.
The default desktop
What greeted me was familiar: Snow Leopard starts like Leopard, down to the pixel.
Apple promises that Snow Leopard frees about 7GB from a comparable Leopard installation. This left me a bit puzzled. With X11 unchecked, but with the foreign language fonts installed, a clean install took up a shade over 10GB. Apple's system requirement is 5GB of free space.
Nevertheless, there's some serious shrinkage going on. Safari's public beta on Leopard weighs in at 45MB, but the Snow Leopard Safari at just 14MB. The Address Book shrinks from 58MB to 15MB. Mail is now 77.5MB.
The Leopard option to 'Open in Rosetta' is still there for PowerPC applications, but there's now an option to open 64-bit apps in 32-bit mode. I noted that for Safari, this was turned off, but Address Book started in 64-bit mode.
Safari starts in 32-bit by default
I discovered that Rosetta isn't a default installation option - you must customise the installation to include it.
If you need Rosetta, remember to choose it at install time, or else you'll need your DVD.
Perhaps it's a licensing issue? Rosetta is the miraculous run-time technology developed at Manchester University by a computer science professor, who went on to found Transitive - a brief history here. IBM acquired the company last year. Rosetta smoothed the migration to Intel hardware enormously, and will be needed for some time.
It has been claimed that Snow Leopard will download Rosetta if it wasn't installed but you need it subsequently. We couldn't confirm this.
COMMENTS
Clever Snow Leopard
Decided to take the plunge and put a new fat and fast hard drive in my Macbook and put Snow Leopard on there. And it works a treat! The best bit so far was on pairing my Nokia n79. Snow Leopard recognised it for a smart phone from Nokia, and offered to set it up as a modem, a quick google for the APN details (on the handset) and it was set up and working. Which is a good job as my internet has decided tonight is the night to take a bath!
back on topic somewhat,,,
Shove the DVD in, couple of clicks... make a cup of tea, wander back 30 mins later just as it's finishing up.
All my stuff works, the computer is slightly faster.. The new gamma looks a bit funny. Looking forward to seeing all this OpenCL/GCD nonsense in future- meantime, I have a slightly quicker and prettier computer.
All very painless. Can't say fairer than that.
@AC Bad Teeth - Health Care
A link for you
Two people in the US die because of lack of dental treatment (which btw, isn't covered by Medicare or Medicaid)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/business/11decay.html?_r=1
Around 50 million Americans cannot afford insurance so have no access to medical care, around 50 million Americans are under insured so if they do need treatment, it will cost them an arm and a leg. Still, all that competition must be really good, seeing as how over 1,500 people queue up at ONE station giving free medical/dental care in LA, must be nice to live in a country which has worse medical care than a 3rd world county, or even Cuba.
Much love...
I do love the Windows lads...
Apple Fanboi: Apple have done this, designed that, tried to compromise this, Windows has this, that and a bit of that and some good bits of this or that.
Linux fanboi: No free software? Oh well, you can try this and I will be good when this O/S get that and we get something that will do this and that and hopefully more compatability with XYZ.
Windows Fanboi: LINUX IS CRAP! APPLE ARE CRAP! MACS ARE CRAP! OOOOH £479 FOR AN O/S UPGRADE? WHERE'S MY WALLET?
"Mail is now 77.5MB."
You know what, I'm still on 10.4 and Mail is only 15MB!
