Well, the UPS man finally brought my family pack upgrade copy of Mac OS X 10.5 aka Leopard. As I mentioned the other day, I have no immediate plans to install it on either of my main systems, the 24″ iMac or 15″ MacBook Pro, known respectively as “Gigantico” and “Lunar Excursion Module” or LEM for short. But that’s exactly why I still have a almost-three-year-old, original issue Mac mini on hand. With a 1.25 GHz G4 processor, 512 MB of RAM and a hard drive with just 15 GB free, the mini juuuussst barely meets Leopard’s minimum specs. No doubt as a result, installation took almost three HOURS! Ouch. But now it’s up and running.
What problems have I hit so far? Gizmo Project, a slick Voice-over-Internet-Protocol program that gives me a second phone line for $35 a year, can’t log in. On Gizmo’s message boards, they’re talking about a beta release that fixes some people’s issues. Apparently, many VoIP programs have been hit by Leopard issues. Next up, Adobe Lightroom, the repository of all my digital photo-y goodness, can’t print and generally acts wonky. Adobe is promising a fix by mid-November.
In the category of mere annoyance, iChat, as always recognizes my iSight camera but the newly installed version of my favorite time waster, Photo Booth, inexplicably says there is no camera attached if iChat is running. On the other hand, Photo Booth now has a command to get fix the mirror reversal effect that drives me bananas (See “Flip Photo” and “Auto Flip New Photos” under the edit menu). UPDATE: Ooops, that flip feature was there all along – how did I miss it?
In terms of some of the smaller apps I use that seem to work just fine, my password cataloger Wallet seems great, Audacity, an open source audio editor, is fine, Amazon.com’s new MP3 downloading app works fine, and myNotes, a favored lightweight note keeper, is all aces (and appears to be more Spotlight friendly).
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