Julio Santos

I installed Leopard on 3 systems and the first two were mostly flawless. Only mostly though:

- You can no longer start mysql from the preferences pane. If like me you had to start mysql after rebooting (I like to control what resources my system uses…got that from Matt) start the preferences pane, change to “automatically run on startup” (or something) and reboot. MySQL should be running after that.

- The other slightly bigger issue is that I can no longer VPN into the office. Juniper Network Connect is broken on Leopard. Apparently Apple forgot to publish certain Intel binds. I tried going back to an older version of the Network Connect client and encrypting libraries, but it didn’t work. For now I can’t work from home. Sucks.

- Finally, the biggest scare was last night when I upgraded our brand new iMac to Leopard. I chose “upgrade” (instead of new install) just like for the 2 other systems. Big mistake. When 10.5 was finally installed and it rebooted for first log in, was when the pain started. I have four users on that box, and none of them could log in. After entering the password, it would show a blue screen for a second or two, then back to the log in screen. Frigging annoying.

I was really looking forward to sleeping an extra hour last night, instead I slept 4 hours less. That’s how long it took to fix the problem as I reinstalled 3 more times. Apparently there’s a known issue that makes Leopard fail in similar ways, but it’s related to “long passwords created in 10.2″. That wasn’t my problem but I tried the alleged fix anyway. Sure enough, it didn’t help.

Ultimately what fixed the problem was to do a “full install” instead of an “upgrade”. I was worried about full installs at first as I was under the wrong impression that it would take much longer or that it would lose my settings or whatever. None of that happened.

If you’re stuck on the log in screen after installing Leopard (upgrade) do this:

- Put the DVD in the drive
- Reboot while holding the C key (not Command-C, just C). This will make your system boot from the CD
- After the installer starts and you’re choosing how it should run, at some point you can bypass the default options. Do that and instead of upgrade choose full install. In addition to a clean install, you will have a new directory with the relevant files of your old/current OS.
- Install
- Wait an hour (remember to skip the disc verification thing, if you already know the DVD is fine)
- Enjoy