Upgrading to Mac OS-X Leopard (10.5.4)

Recently I upgraded my older (PPC) MacMini to Leopard. The experience has generally been a nightmare, the two largest problems being rampant issues with WiFi and the X server, but with many little problems all over in both the operating system and applications.

WiFi

There are a number of issues here, some of them apparently unsolvable at the moment. For example, every time the computer goes or is put to sleep now it cannot connect to my WiFi access point when it wakes up. Judging from comments around the Internet, this is a very common problem for Leopard with no fixes.

There are also issues with Firefox and core IPv6 features. On the one hand it's maybe good that they're there. On the other hand, they don't play well with almost any commodity hardware (APs) and have to be disabled. There is a good discussion here about the issues. Two things that fixed the problems for me:

• Firefox: Tell Firefox to just not use IPv6. In about:config, set network.dns.disableIPv6 to true.
• IPv6: You may also have to turn off IPv6 configuration for your connections, though it doesn't seem as critical. Do so via System Preferences -> Network -> Advanced (on all your connections having problems) -> TCP/IP -> Configure IPv6 -> Off.

X11

Doing a fresh install and then applying the Software Update OS Combo breaks X11. Installing a newer XQuartz package fixes the problem. Note that you should still not put it in the Dock and/or schedule to start at login. In general, it will launch automatically the first time it's needed.

Emacs

Currently I'm trying to use Carbon Emacs. It's mostly ok.

• Startup: The opening startup screen is annoying as hell. Get rid of it by putting this in your .emacs: (setq inhibit-splash-screen t)

Keyboard Navigation

To make the Tab key flip between all controls rather than just text boxes and lists, enable System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Full Keyboard Access -> All Controls. Finally!

• Note though that this, annoyingly, doesn't really work well with alert boxes (i.e. simply yes/no dialogs).

Adobe Products

Despite not being mentioned anywhere in the list of requirements, Adobe's CS3 software (and possibly other product lines) won't install on a case-sensitive file system. This is ridiculous, and is about to cost me many many hours of reinstalling and reconfiguring the whole computer to revert back. As I write this paragraph it's 21:18 on Monday, July 14th, 2008, and Macintosh and Adobe just lost my business, advocacy, and faith for a long, long time to come.

Web Development

It's pretty awesome that Leopard ships with Apache installed, but it doesn't have a ton of modules. A good guide on installing Apache 2 with PHP support using MacPorts is presented here.