The Disaster-Free Upgrade to Mac OS X -- Part 2
Pages: 1, 2, 3
Installing the operating systems
By the time you're finished, you'll have installed three operating systems on your internal drive: OS X and OS 9.1 on one partition, and your old OS 9 environment on the other. If that sounds excessive, understand that this is where the "disaster-free" guarantee comes into play. The redundancy allows you to play with the new OS as time allows while still being able to perform your daily tasks as before.
First you're going to install the version of Mac OS 9.1 that came with your Mac OS X upgrade. This will be your Classic environment that resides on your Mac OS X partition.
After Classic is installed, switch to the Mac OS X CD (reboot with it) and install that operating system on your OS X partition. I like to use the Custom Install option so I can see everything that's included. Be sure to choose the BSD goodies (BSD subsystem and additional print drivers).
Also, I highly recommend installing the Developer Tools as part of your package. If for no other reason, do it to get WorldText and Sketch. They are both terrific applications that anyone would want. You can find them in:
Developer --> Applications --> Extras
You're two thirds of the way home now. Reboot your Mac off the internal hard drive. The easiest way to do this is to hold down the Option key during restart. You'll get to choose which OS you want to boot with.
Now you're ready to add your old operating system and applications to your laptop. In my case, I plugged in the FireWire drive and my PowerBook recognized it immediately in Mac OS X. I copied the entire contents of the old drive to my Mac OS 9 partition on the laptop
Talk about made in the shade. Your Mac now has OS X, Classic, and your old environment all loaded and ready to go. So how do you choose between them?
Simply go to System Preferences (it's on the dock) and choose Startup Disk. Your Mac will scan your hard drive for viable startup folders and present them to you in a dialogue box. You simply click on the one you want, then restart.
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Just so you'll have complete confidence that you haven't lost anything, go ahead and choose your old system on the Mac OS 9 partition and restart. Viola! It's just like your old baby. The only downside for me was that I had to reestablish all of my alias connections and tidy up the desktop a bit.
To return to Mac OS X, go to the Startup Disk control panel, select Mac OS X, and restart. Boom! You're back in Mac OS X.
What I've learned since upgrading
I have just a few personal comments resulting from my life after the upgrade.
First, I'm really glad I have my entire "old computer" on the other partition. I've gone back to it many times to search for an old e-mail or find a stray graphic. I highly recommend that you give up the disk space and save your old environment -- especially if this is your main computer.
Second, the Carbon version of IE 5.1 that comes with the upgrade isn't very good. I recommend that you download OmniWeb 4.0 which is a beautiful, full-featured browser written in native Mac OS X. You can try it out, and if you like it, the license is $29.
Also, if you're in an 802.11b networking environment that isn't from an Airport Base Station, you may not be able to connect using your regular password. If you enter the Hex version, however, it works. I don't know why. To get the Hex conversion, you can download BBEdit which handles those conversions for you.
If you use QuickTime, Mac OS X provides you with version 5. Pro users will be disappointed to learn that their registration number for Pro version 3 and 4 doesn't work with version 5. You have to pony-up the $29 for a new registration number for version 5, or use your old version of QuickTime in the Classic environment.
A final word of caution: the Aqua interface is addicting. I've found that if I can accomplish a task in Mac OS X, that's what I use because I love the dock, graphics, and the overall feel of the environment.
Beware of false economy
This approach to upgrading to Mac OS X is a conservative one. There are lots of corners you could cut, but is the money you save worth more than your data or the time that you waste trying to figure out work-arounds?.
What I've tried to create is a very safe environment for migration so you can begin learning about Apple's new operating system without worrying about losing valuable data or functionality. I hope you have the opportunity to give it a try.
Derrick Story is the author of The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers, The Digital Photography Companion, and Digital Photography Hacks, and coauthor of iPhoto: The Missing Manual, with David Pogue. You can follow him on Twitter or visit www.thedigitalstory.com.
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Apple Laptop Keyboards Unsuitable for Unix Users
2002-09-18 01:58:58 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
Apple laptops are effectively unusable for unix users.
I am a long-time Unix user. That means I need to have the Ctrl key to the left of the A key. This is a genuine need, not merely a want; it is based upon ergonomics. The Ctrl key is heavily used in unix, and it must be easily accessable. It cannot be off in the lower left corner of the keyboard where it is difficult to get at, and where it distorts the position of your left hand such that you can't easily type other keys while holding the Ctrl key down.
Apple desktop keyboards are now all USB. They are all OK. The CapsLock key can be re-mapped into a Ctrl key.
Unfortunately, even in this modern age, all Apple laptops have built-in ADB keyboards. The ADB keyboard is broken-by-design. It is, in general, not possible to remap the CapsLock key into a Ctrl key.
There are some exceptions, but they are horrible kludges. They are
horrible kludges because the original design of the ADB keyboard was a horrible kludge. The correct solution would be for Apple to re-design their laptop motherboards to use built-in USB keyboards. This hasn't happened yet. If you run Linux, use Debian's solution. For Mac OS X users, uControl works. There are no solutions (that I know of) for either NetBSD or OpenBSD. Please note once again that the "solutions" above are in fact kludges, because of the original bad design of the ADB keyboard.
Apple is (currently) ignoring Unix users! This is not merely speculation on my part. In an on-going email exchange I am having with an Apple employee (whom I won't name) in their marketing department, the Apple marketing person directly stated to me that Apple was catering to their historic Mac customers, and is purposely ignoring the Unix market. He also claimed that Apple would soon start paying more attention to the Unix market. I won't hold my breath. Apple has been ignoring Unix users for more than 10 years. I expect that trend to continue. (Also note that my Apple contact indicated that Macs would never ship with a 3-button mouse, even though Apple intended to port almost all X-window software and deliver it either on a CD/DVD or installed directly on each Mac's hard drive. How Unix friendly is a 1-button mouse with X programs that often require 3 buttons?)
Apple has now lost two opportunities to sell me hardware. I really wanted an Apple laptop for their superior battery life, and for the PowerPC with Altivec CPU. (The Altivec is vastly superior to the x86 line for DSP.) Because I can't live with the broken-by-design built-in ADB keyboard in all Apple laptops, Sony and IBM sold me laptops instead. If Apple fixes this problem, they will sell me a PowerBook next year; if they don't, I'll still be running OpenBSD on x86 hardware, and wishing I could use a Mac.
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Another idea how to use the old hard drive
2001-05-22 08:50:32 raynewton [Reply | View]
What a great article on migration to OS X and averting disasters! It got me thinking. Why not remove the old hard drive from the PowerBook and put it into a FireWire enclosure which sells for about $85. Then you do not need a backup (it becomes your backup). You have improved your versatility all around. For about $220 you have a new portable, bootable backup drive and a new larger hard drive in the PowerBook
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Great article... but one unexpected problem
2001-05-14 04:44:04 nomad7674 [Reply | View]
I followed the instructions in this article carefully this past weekend when upgrading to OS X and overall, it was a good experience.
One extra bit of advice, though is to make sure that you TEST your backup device a few times before doing this process. After my OS X install, I went to copy my old disk image back to the second partition and found that OS X would freeze if I asked it to copy more than about 20 files at a a time. Same problem appears when booting from the 9 folder on the X partition. Not sure if the problem is X-related or hardware in nature, but it sure put a damper on my enjoyment of X over the weekend.
Luckily, the upgrade is still "disaster-free" as I can still run all of my files from the backup drive, and can copy them one at a time. It may just be a long night tonight.
THanks for a good article.
By the way, am I the only person using X who feels that iCab's beta is better than Omniweb? -
Great article... but one unexpected problem
2001-05-14 07:27:48 Derrick Story |
[Reply | View]
Yes, definitely test your backup drive before installing your entire computing life on it! You didn't mention what type of drive it was (FireWire?), but I'm happy to hear that disaster didn't befall you and that you have the pleasure of learning Mac OS X now without worrying about your data. -
Great article... but one unexpected problem
2001-05-15 04:54:24 nomad7674 [Reply | View]
Yup, a FireWire drive (a generic one bought from MacWarehouse last year). There have been some good ideas from www.MacFixIt.com's boards on a fix, too, so I may get beyond it. Current front-runner diagnosis is that I have a file with an illegal character in it. (Allegedly, Alladin installs a file which causes problems.) -
Great article... but one unexpected problem
2001-05-15 07:31:31 Derrick Story |
[Reply | View]
Sounds like the problem is more with the file than the drive ... If you try to copy the same info to another "regular" System 9 Mac, do you still have the same problem? -
Great article... but one unexpected problem
2001-05-16 12:10:22 nomad7674 [Reply | View]
Unfortunately, I only have one FireWire Mac in the house to work with. It still occurs if I try, however, to boot off of the 9 System folder on my X partition or if I try to boot off a 9 System Folder on the second partition (System 9.1 only).
I am starting to suspect the problem is the hardware, as the hangs also occur when launching a very large file/process. I am wondering if either:
1. The FireWire drive is faulty. Maybe I need to install new drivers to it.
2. My Firmware is not at the right level. I thought I had upgraded prior to my X install, but I am now wondering if I used the right ones.
Thanks again.
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Good article, and a few notes.
2001-05-11 12:05:15 tz [Reply | View]
Target disk mode is indispensable. I have an x86 linux system with the 2.4 kernel with full firewire support, so imaging was plugging the iBook in and doing "dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/tape".
I have a VXA tape drive, and for speed, "dd if=/dev/sda bs=1024k | dd of=/dev/tape bs=4096k" seems faster for my specific system, so you can optimize the backup with buffer sizing. I also have Mac partition support, so I probably could do a few more things.
Retrospect under OS 9.1 will NOT PROPERLY BACK UP OS X PARTITIONS. It actually backs up all the files, but it has no knowledge of symlinks, so they end up as small text files with the path where they are supposed to point to upon a restore. This is with HFS+, it can't even see UFS. So I use the target disk mode trick to back up everything else too including my linuxPPC partition.
I Tri-boot, using the option key during startup a lot. Actually I also netboot (Running linuxppc or macos from the above x86 linux box), both my iBook and iMac.
I have a number of data partitions. I copy the system folder and a few other critical things as an alternate boot since it is easy to fix things if you can boot, but if the boot is broken it is much more difficult to fix, so I have my normal Mac OS 9.1 partition and Linux boot partition, and they are mirrored on other data partitions.
The more memory the better. And since ram has become cheap, it is probably the lowest cost performance option. 128k is minimum, 256k is the minimum if you really want to use OS X to its fullest with Classic (that eats 64k) and have all the apps open and switch between them. But I even bought a 512k stick so my iMac DV has 640M.
Partition numbers can get changed by the install so I had to edit my yaboot.conf to boot linux. It took a couple attempts to find hd10 moved to hd12.
Mac doesn't care about partition sequence, but yaboot/linux does (strange things happen when / isn't where /etc/fstab says it is).
Let me second OmniWeb. That is all I use to surf now (the rare exceptions are Netscape under Linux or MacOS 9.1 when I'm booted in those and have to get something).
Another downside is that the ONLY video media OS X currently handles is DV. So my Dazzle Hollywood+ converter works with an NTSC camera, but my old USB webcams don't and won't until a driver is written. I think the Firewire webcams work.
There is a further problem with QuickTime - if you bought the key recently, it will work. But if you upgrade 9.1 to Quicktime 5, it will disable or delete Quicktime 4. So you may want to leave 9.1 at QT 4 if you don't want to upgrade OS X.
Also, there is no "network browser". You have to use the "connect to server" which is like the chooser. It works but I find it less convenient.
And you will eventually need to learn how to use NetInfo Manager (in Applications/Utilities). This sets the kinds of things which are normally in /etc/hosts, /etc/passwd, and /etc/resolv.conf (but are overridden by lookupd - think of how NIS works). Much of this can be configured by the various System Preferences and other apps, but they do so by making netinfo entries.
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Surprise! Classic saves OS X
2001-05-10 14:24:50 pcacace [Reply | View]
I have read that many people are frustrated with the Classic experience, and have been reverting back to OS9 for now.
For me, Classic has been filling in where X can't deliver. Its true that many apps run much faster in Classic than in OS9. And OS X seems to manage systrem memory much more efficiently, even with minimum RAM.
IE5.1 Preview run too slow? Use IE5 or Netscape 7 in Classic and performance is fantastic. Acrobat reader 5 fails in X? Use the Get Info command to open it in Classic.
However there are still plenty of reasons to boot into OS 9. For example, Imovie2 in X is a frustrating, lagging experience - but it will not run in Classic. Anything Airport related is best left to OS9 as well.
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What's up, Mail.app?
2001-05-10 07:17:51 AndresSKL [Reply | View]
I want to import my database + contacts from Entourage to Mail.app, but there's an "AppleEvent timed out" error message. Addressbook.app doesn't import the exported messages from Entourage as well. Any tip? Any suggestions, please? Actually i have to use Entourage in Classic as email client.
TIA, Andres. -
What's up, Mail.app?
2001-05-10 10:57:34 Derrick Story |
[Reply | View]
That's a great question!
I have had mixed feelings about Mail 1.0. On one hand, it's beautiful, and I love the Quartz-rendering, automatic spell-check, etc.
On the other hand, it seems like a terrible client for managing lots of mail!
One of my little weekend projects was to import Entourage data into mail 1.0. Based on your note, sounds like I'd better not raise my expectations too high.
Has anyone successfully done this?
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Disaster Recovery Plans are Mandatory-Part 1
2001-05-09 08:19:12 a_weisburd [Reply | View]
OSX, particularly as of 10.0.2, is really getting to be quite nice. However, Classic is mandatory, and in the name of making it work better, the ability to dual-boot, either using OSX, or OS9.1, seems to have been sacrificed. Note that I've been using this system since before it had a face (i.e. Darwin).
For reasons I've not quite isolated, the OS9.1 partition used for Classic can prove hard to boot back into. Rebuilding the desktop every time you have to boot 9.1 propper seems to be mandatory, and even then, FileSharing will commonly fail to startup.
The damage done can get to be so severe, and OS9.1 so dysfunctional, that having a way to restore a clean copy of your 9.1 and 9.1 applications can be essential. A solution: make your own Software Restore package.
More to follow... -
Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed-OSX Recovery Part2
2001-05-09 12:09:32 a_weisburd [Reply | View]
Your experience may be a good deal more trouble free, but after my first attempt at running OSX final ended with my OS9.1 partition hosed, I wanted to be better prepared next time.
The cast:
->4gb partition, my main OS9.1, with a vast assortment of application.
->4gb partition for OSX
->10gb Documents partition, featuring a read-only/compressed disk image of my main OS9.1 partition, including applications.
->650mb partition, with OS9.1 and the bare minimum number of applications that I have to have available via Classic.
The plot:
When I need to use OS9.1, and not Classic, I need to in a hurry. Taking a day to put Humpty Dumpty back together again is not something I've got time for. Equipped with a custom disk image and my trusty Apple Software Restore application, I can restore a clean, fully functional OS9.1, complete with applications, wipe the offending OSX partition, and be back to work in under 20 minutes. Knowing that I can do this makes the sometimes bumpy ride of OSX a good deal more enjoyable.
My disk image weighs in at about 900mb. In order to use Apple Software Restore to restore this image, rather than the image that my Mac shipped with, the disk image has to have a script run against it. The script (Scan Image for ASR) is available as part of the Disk Copy package supplied with the Installer SDK 1.2.4 (and available via FTP from Apple). Complete instructions are available at macaddict.com.
Among it's features, ASR allows you to reformat a single partition, and as such can also be used to wipe and restore something onto your OSX partition. Note that OSX will leave behind an odd assortment of files which are difficult to remove. ASR makes quick work of this, without requiring the reformatting of your entire HD.
As a final note: by the time you're faced with having to do this, you may be unable to boot off of any OS9.1 partition, and may have to resort to a CD. If you have a TiBook, and haven't heard yet, the OS9.1 that shipped with OSX will not boot your Mac. You have to use the System that shipped with it....
Cheers!
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Hooked on OS X (Bad Thing)
2001-05-08 17:33:30 crazysapsucker [Reply | View]
I got a little carried away with the idea of OS X and waited eagerly for its arrival. The day it came out I anxiously installed the "world's most advanced operating" system without much consideration.
I was thrilled by what I saw! No more crashing, no more mp3's skipping because I happened to be scrolling down a text field. Here's the problem: I am an active web site designer and video editor. Obviously, Final Cut Pro 2 doesn't work in OS X, but not even applications like Macromedia Fireworks run that well - in fact they run horribly.
But I couln't bear to let go of OS X! It was everything I ever wanted in an operating system. I finally decided to boot from OS 9.1; I was shocked by what i saw. All the Type/Creator idata of my files was lost. Things were almost badn in the native OS 9 environment as they were in the OS X classic environment. When I run Microsoft Word in both the classic and native OS 9 environments it is unable to save.
I love apple but I think the classic environment is a joke, I have yet to find an application that runs for more than 5 minutes without serious errors or crashing. And even booting from OS 9 has problems. OS X is absolutely perfect for running OS X apps - but that's it.
Good article... -
Hooked on OS X (Bad Thing) - Classic Story
2001-05-10 13:50:22 jthwaites [Reply | View]
I already posted something about this. I'm really dull.
Classic must go, it can't be too soon. It sounds like a good thing, it should be a good thing, surely it's a good thing. No, it isn't.
Dual-boot works. Perfectly. Classic doesn't.
I was a fan (hey, be nice to me) of IBM OS/2. The most embarrassing thing about it was its Windows 3.1 "box". I kept on having to explain to people why this couldn't be as good as Windows 3.1. Oops. They just bought Windows 3.1 instead.
Classic makes OS X a problem child. I keep trying to make the flippin' thing work with all my apps. It won't. I have to dual boot anyway. Therefore, Classic is zero-value. Get rid of it, now! -
Hooked on OS X (Bad Thing)
2001-05-08 22:27:18 Derrick Story |
[Reply | View]
I certainly have empathy for your situation and can understand your frustration. Personally, I haven't had the same bad experience with Classic. The applications I use in that environment are different than yours however -- Photoshop 6, Entourage 2001, Word 2001, and BBEdit 5.1.
If your hardware is current, and you initialize your hard drive with the latest Mac OS X drivers, you should be on pretty solid ground.
I'd like to hear from more folks about their Classic experience. Any detailed information you can include would be helpful ... -
Classic experience.
2001-05-11 12:22:42 tz [Reply | View]
I had to go through a bit of effort to check which extensions were on. Most seem to do the right thing, but a few conflicted with the environment. I can't say exactly what you need or not, but I think removing extensions for special hardware generally helps things. And I remember reading that Conflict Catcher had or has a technote or something about this.
I use it for RealPlayer 8 - this works very well, and have used Photoshop 5LE, without any problems (Omniweb launches IE 5 on realmedia links, so cut-paste helps; IE 5 can't play realmedia and won't launch realplayer). Of course now that I have GIMP running I will probably use that instead of Photoshop.
Almost everything else I might want to use under OS 9.1 requires real OS 9.1 since it involves hardware like a scanner that doesn't have an OS X driver.
OTOH, I wonder if it would be useful to port MOL (mac on linux) to Darwin/OSX and run a virtualized alternate screen. Some things might work better.
Apple DON'T have support for these machines so there's NO DVD Player.
In a few words, OS X can't handle DVD Playback on them.
That's because Apple did'n offer support to the ATI Video Cards, so Full Screen Video is NOT possible.
If you don't care about this, OS X is a great thing.