OS X Panther?

Hi,

Anyone out there have an opinion about the present state of OS X Panther? Should I wait before switching over from 10.4.x? I have heard some comments about it dramatically slowing down the system, and not being quite ready from prime time... Any thoughts? (Of course I am primarily interested with respect to Lispworks...)

David McClain

Chief Technical Officer

Refined Audiometrics Laboratory

4391 N. Camino Ferreo

Tucson, AZ 85750

email: dbm@refined-audiometrics.com

phone: 1.520.390.3995

web: http://www.refined-audiometrics.com

Re: OS X Panther?

On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 08:53:47 -0700, David McClain <dbm@refined-audiometrics.com> wrote:

> Anyone out there have an opinion about the present state of OS X
> Panther? Should I wait before switching over from 10.4.x? I have
> heard some comments about it dramatically slowing down the system,
> and not being quite ready from prime time... Any thoughts? (Of
> course I am primarily interested with respect to Lispworks...)

Hi David,

I haven't tried LispWorks with Panther yet, so I can't say anything
about it, but I bought a new iMac for my wife last week which had
Tiger preloaded and came with a Panther upgrade DVD.  I upgraded to
Panther and installed her usual apps and I encountered several issues
while I was doing that.  Amongst other things, Mail.app crashed a
couple of times when connecting to an IMAP server, connecting to our
wireless LAN was troublesome, Parallels (even with the latest update)
didn't work correctly, and the printer driver for our Lexmark printer
didn't work at all.

Granted, most of these probably aren't things Apple is directly
responsible for, but my general impression was that it is maybe a bit
premature to switch to Panther if you don't need to.  I erased the
hard disk, re-installed Tiger, and everything works fine now.

Edi.

Re: OS X Panther?

On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:31:12 +0100, Didier Verna <didier@lrde.epita.fr> wrote:

> You guys are talking about upgrading to Leopard right?

Right, that was the cat I meant... :)

Re: OS X Panther?


       You guys are talking about upgrading to Leopard right ? Or is it
April 1st ? :-)

Anyway, it's highly recommended to upgrade from Tiger with the "archive"
method. It backs up your previous installation in a directory of its
own, and installs an brand new OS from scratch. You can then gradually
re-import things.

This is better because it's always a good thing to restart from scratch
from time to time, and also because a number of things can go wrong with
a real upgrade, especially if you have some system tweaking that Apple
can't predict (SIMBL, Application Enhancer come to mind).

-- 
Resistance is futile. You will be jazzimilated.

Didier Verna, didier@lrde.epita.fr, http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier

EPITA / LRDE, 14-16 rue Voltaire   Tel.+33 (0)1 44 08 01 85
94276 Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, France   Fax.+33 (0)1 53 14 59 22  didier@xemacs.org

Re: OS X Panther?

David McClain <dbm@refined-audiometrics.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Anyone out there have an opinion about the present state of OS X  
> Panther? 

Panther is getting old, so I guess you mean Leopard ;)

> Should I wait before switching over from 10.4.x? I have  
> heard some comments about it dramatically slowing down the system,  
> and not being quite ready from prime time... Any thoughts? (Of course  
> I am primarily interested with respect to Lispworks...)

It's not slowing down my systems - some things are significantly
faster.  I've upgraded my work laptop (MacBook Pro) and most of the
family machines at home (one iBook, one MacBook and one PowerBook 12")
- all without issues, /except/ that the PowerBook and iBook were
painfully slow on the WLAN before I downloaded Apple's keychain fix
(which they quickly released). LispWorks 5.0.2 with the Leopard
patches works fine. The only thing that still seems a little "beta" to
me is X11, but it's usable.
-- 
  (espen)