Fifteen minutes after the first power-up, the computer is humming away, and pleasantly quietly at that. Just like the Thinkpad, if I remember correctly. And just as XP needed to be upgraded to Service Pack 1 shortly after I received the IBM, the Mac comes with an upgrade-ready operating system. However, the upgrade is not a few days in the future, it has already happened, and the Leopard DVD is part of the package.
May I ask what kept Apple's army of cheap Chinese labor from installing the latest version of the operating system? The computer was ordered after the revision came out. Is this an indirect admission of the bugginess of the latest and greatest? Caveat emptor? Only upgrade if you really know what you're doing?
At this point, I restrict myself to a system update. Almost twenty packages are found whose installation proceeds speedily. In the end I have to reboot the computer. Apple tries very hard to make the transition from Windows to Mac as smooth as possible, it seems.
I have heard that, to ensure a satisfying user experience, one should not upgrade X11. I decide to play it safe and go with Tiger's X. Finding the optional packages on the installer CD takes me a while. I hope I'll eventually get used to Finder. I make sure to back up /etc/X11 and /usr/X11R6 to override Leopards files later.
Following at the heels of X (and the instructions on Bill Scott's website) come the Xcode developer tools, apparently a set of libraries, weighing in at a portly two and a half gig, without which X isn't even remotely useful, at least if you plan to do crystallography. What an ugly monster of a sentence that was. Sorry.
Gary Kerbaugh's pkgdiff script verifies that the installation of X11 is complete. No problem here. No problems at all? Well, I still haven't found the delete key.
Speaking about deleting, how do I uninstall applications? I don't need an Aperture demo version, and I don't want to test drive Microsoft Office. There is no reason for these programs to clutter up my hard drive. Do I just pull the icons into the trash? I have to ask someone more experienced.
Now, I'm off to see the Leopard, the wonderful Leopard of OS (X). Keep your fingers crossed.
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