Apple has announced the next version of Mac OS X to be called Leopard. It is schedule to ship on October 26 2007. Leopard will build upon Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, adding many new innovative features as well as support for 64-bit applications both for PowerPC G5 and new Intel 64-bit processors. 32-bit applications will continue to be supported and available for 32-bit computers such as the PowerPC G4 and all the 32-bit Intel Mac systems that used the original Core Duo processor. Leopard requires a Mac system with an Intel processor, G5 processor or a G4 processor that is 867MHz or faster. Slower G4 and G3 systems cannot run Leopard.

Leopard will feature an exciting new backup solution called Time Machine. Time Machine will require an external hard drive or a file server to operate. In either case, you will need a substantial amount of space to take full advantage of the features of Time Machine. Your Time Machine drive should be larger than the size of the hard drive inside of your Mac that you wish to back up. If you are not already backing up your data regularly, please contact Sollos to help you set up automated, reliable and extremely fast backups today regardless of the version of Mac OS X you are running.

Leopard will no longer support Classic. If you use Classic, you will have to remain on Tiger or you will have to dual boot your computer either in Mac OS 9 or in Leopard.

Font Management will be improved in Leopard with auto-activation being added to Font Book. Sollos continues to recommend that design professionals look to Insider Software's FontAgent Pro for the font management needs. FontAgent Pro released a new version 4.0 early in 2008. Also note that with the absence of Classic support on Leopard, certain older fonts will no longer be supported. Please see our font management report for additional details.

Leopard Server will enhance functionality for your workgroup services by providing Spotlight searching across the network and a new calendar server module. This along with the ability to use Time Machine to back up your individual workstations to your central file server can greatly enhance your productivity and reliability of network resources.

Getting Ready

First, make a full backup of your system. This is vital as many things can potentially go wrong and you the last thing you want is to lose data. Going backwards without a full backup is not an option.

Second, run Disk Warrior and permissions repair to make sure everything is in optimal working order prior to installing Leopard.

Check to see if you have Unsanity's APE installed. This is used by many third party software add-ons and is quite possibly on your system. You must have the latest version to be ready for Leopard or you will have problems. It may be preferable to completely remove APE as even the latest release has limited 10.5 compatibility.

Post Install

After the install Leopard will be extremely busy for a long time. This was the same case with Tiger and for the same reason as Leopard goes through your entire drive to update is updated Spotlight information. After a day of slow painful performance your reward will be even faster search results than Tiger and not only for local files, but for searches across servers as well.

You should immediately perform software updates and the first one Apple released is vital and will take a while to run and do its thing. Please be patient.

Issues

There are many issues with Leopard at this stage and Apple is working on resolving them quickly. One that effects many people is wireless networking failure. To resolve this, you must reboot the computer into Safe Mode by holding down the shift key while rebooting. This will take some time and will announce Safe Mode to you. Once it is booted, you can immediately reboot back into normal mode and the problem should be cleared.

Time Machine will use quite a bit of resources especialy on older Macs. In addition, Time Machine does not work well with all software. The three applications that definitely do not play well with Time Machine include Microsoft Entourage, Aperture, and virtualization software such as Parallels Desktop and VMware. In all of these cases it is key that you exclude these programs from using Time Machine. With Aperture, failing to do so can lead to data corruption. In the case of the other applications, the result will be massive redundant backups since their data files are single monolithic files that are constantly being updated so Time Machine will want to back them up fully every hour of every day.

Ars Technica has an article discussing the issues being experienced with Leopard installations.

It is also becoming clear that Leopard is very particular about the quality of the memory in your computer. Several people have experienced installation failures that come down to problematic memory. Memory that did not appear to cause any issues with earlier Mac OS X releases. Again, be certain to do a full backup prior to installation.

Update -- In July 2008 Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.4. This version of Leopard has finally stabilized Leopard to the point the Sollos can recommend people begin considering upgrading from older systems.

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