Yesterday I upgraded my macbook pro to Leopard, the latest OS X operating system, over a year after Apple released it. Whew. It took me 4 days to organize, clean and backup my stuff (over 200GB), about a day to figure out how to install leopard without a bootable DVD (see leopard dmg install), and less than an hour to do the actual install. Why now? Not because of all the new features, but because I wanted to develop an iPhone app. Stay tuned for more on that. Yay.
After a fresh install, here’s what I add/customize:
- Firefox 3 [Free] – fast, but I love that it remembers all URLS and you just type any part of the URL or Page Title and it shows you dropdown of possible matches. Also love these firefox add-ons/plugins: greasemonkey, web developer, firebug, live HTTP Headers, more.
- iLife ’08 [$$] – new iTunes (love the Genius), new iPhoto (love the auto-grouping of events), and more.
- Adobe CS4 [$$] – gotta have Photoshop, Acrobat, Indesign, etc.
- VLC [Free] – best media player out there – avi, mpg, mp3, mov, wav, etc – i love “hot keys” -† its FREE
- Xee [Free] – Excellent gif/jpg viewer (don’t *need* this in leopard)
- iSquint [Free] – convert digital camera movies from big file sizes to smaller for upload, sharing, ipod, or iphone.
- Transmission [Free] – bit torrent client, so you can download movies, tv, games
- Handbrake [Free] – Rip DVDs – in one-step, create .avi movies for ipod, iphone, etc.
- iStumbler [Free] – helps you find a good wifi signal when you’re not home or office.
- SuperDuper [Free] – easy way to back up your entire laptop to external drive or network.
- Chicken of the VNC [Free] – if you have a windows or linux box, put vnc server on it, then install this vnc client on your mac, and now you can control your windows from mac!
How to install Leopard from a .dmg file – My Constraints:
- Leopard not on DVD, only 7GB .dmg file
- Tiger is available on bootable DVD
- Cannot boot on USB or Firewire drive
I am providing this because some of the more popular methods did not work for me. If the following does not make sense, read this original guide and the digg comments on it. Here’s an overview followed by notes:
- Prepare. Backup all your important files, docs, iTunes library (split itunes library), iPhoto library (split iPhoto library), etc on an external drive or network drive. Make sure you 7GB leopard install .dmg is handy (on your backup drive is fine).
- Create a 2nd partition, 8GB or larger, where we’ll put the leopard install .dmg, then we’ll boot from that and install leopard onto big partition, see NOTE below.
- Prepare 2nd partition as a bootable Leopard Install option, see NOTE below.
- Reboot, hold down ALT, pick leopard install boot option, Install leopard on 1st partition – I recommend erase and install, but you can also upgrade.
- Optional: Merge 2 partitions together – Caveat: I have not done this – delete 2nd partition then resize partition.
NOTE: Creating 2nd Partition in Tiger
Tiger’s “Disk Utility” application creates Apple Partition when I re-partitioned it, with no option for creating a GUID partition. On Intel mac’s, you need GUID partition in order to boot the drive and to install tiger. However, http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1600 said to “erase” partition and it would be given GUID paritition – This also did not work. What did work is using the command line program diskutil, which you can run from the terminal application. Example of what I did
% diskutil partitionDisk disk0 2 GPTFormat HFS+ Big_Daddy 224GB HFS+ leopard_install 8GB
NOTE: Preparing 2nd Partition
Many web pages said to use “Disk Utility” to restore .dmg as source and the newly created 2nd partition as destination. This did not work for me, and as apple support states, sometimes disks cannot be dragged to destination in “Disk Utility” from Tiger DVD. So I installed tiger on the first partition (erasing it first) in order to get a working “Disk Utility”. Now dragging disks worked but whenever I clicked on “restore”, “Disk Utility” gave error 2, 16, or some other number. What did work is mounting .dmg file (use hdiutil or just double click it), then using the command line program “asr” from terminal. Example:
sudo hdiutil attach leopard_install.dmg
sudo asr restore --source "/Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD" --target /dev/disk0s3 --erase
In hindsight, this should all work from terminal app from Tiger DVD right at boot – you should not need to reinstall tiger.