My Reinstallation of Leopard

by Bruce on November 19, 2007

A few weeks ago I wrote an article on improving Leopard’s startup. Since then I have been looking for other ways to tweak it and to find out why it was slower than Tiger. I have decided to share what I learned herein. I will also describe how I am now using my iMac differently thanks to some of Leopard’s new features.

The Problem

As to the likely cause of the problem I was having (blue screen for lengthy period at startup), I found this article from Apple that describes a cause and gives three options for fixing it. I decided to try the third option, which was to run the following code:
/sbin/fsck -fy /sbin/mount -uw / rm -rf /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/ApplicationEnhancer.bundle reboot
This removes an offending utility that does not work well with Leopard, the Application Enhancer Bundle. (Macworld has very good, detailed instructions on this.) There are only a few applications or utilities that install this turd, but the symptoms suggested that I may have installed one of those few applications. I think it could have been a Widget called iStatNano, which stopped functioning when I upgrading to Leopard, but I do not know. Update: While I have seen some reports of NeoOffice incompatibilities with Leopard, several people have told me it works fine for them. It did seem to work fine on my system when I had done a Tiger-to-Leopard upgrade, and uninstalling appeared to have no benefit. I have not reinstalled it since doing a complete reinstallation, but based on what I have been told it should not pose a problem.

Addressing The Problem

I ran the above code. [It turns out that I had to use "sudo" to run some of the commands (notably the one that removes the ApplicationEnhancer)]. All of this was to no avail. Thomas helped me research the problem and came up with several links that discuss the problem further but none really contained anything that gave me additional insight.

I kept uninstalling applications and going through the /Library files to remove caches and preferences associated with those applications, but just did not get an improvement.

Although none of what I did caused any problems with the actual operation of the system (which was great), I decided to try a reinstallation, using the Archive and Install method of installing Leopard. While this gave me an installation with fresh installs of all of the system applications, it also preserved all of my settings, so that any offending setting or preference was still embedded in the new install. In short, no improvement.

So, yesterday I did a completely fresh install: an Erase and Install option. There is nothing that really forced me into this situation. The system was fine, but I had lost confidence in it because of all of the deletions I had done (application removals, preference deletions, cache deletions).

The system is more snappy now, although the startup is still not as snappy as it was with Tiger. Perhaps after it finishes building all of its caches, it will be better. Bottom line, though, is that Leopard is a more snappy operating system. Tiger was impressive, and Leopard is even more so (except for a little longer startup).

Some Lessons Learned

On the positive side, my BootCamp partition was maintained during the reinstall. I was a bit concerned that it would be overwritten, and had a backup of it just in case, but it is a separate partition and the Leopard install does not mess with it. Hence, I still have a bootable Windows XP Pro installation on my iMac.

One key lesson is to be really careful about what you install on your system. Also, before upgrading from Tiger to Leopard, you want to be sure your applications are all compatible with Leopard. If you have anything that installed ApplicationEnhancer, get rid of it before you upgrade. Of course you can bypass all the hassle by just doing a fresh install, as I ultimately wound up doing.

For those of us that decide to do a fresh install, it is important to backup everything. This includes Address Book data and other PIM data, in addition to files and email and browser bookmarks. I failed to backup my Address Book data and now have to jump through hoops to repopulate the data.

In doing a fresh install, I lost the benefit of having the iLife applications, which came bundled free with my original Tiger installation. I suppose now that I will have to buy iLife, unless any of you know how I can recover it from my Tiger installation disk. Update: Thomas provides a couple of links in the comments below, which tell you how to recover iLife apps. I followed the advice of the first link and reinstalled the iLife apps painlessly. Thanks, Thomas!

Because of the hassles I have gone through on this, I am being very slow and methodical in reinstalling applications and probably will not reinstall all of the apps I had on Tiger. It pays to really check out each application via Googling and examining User Group threads before installing the application. There are still some popular applications that are not fully compatible with Leopard. For example, although QuickSilver is reported to be upgraded for Leopard, I am not using it at the moment. I uninstalled it during my troubleshooting period, noticed that doing so did not make a difference, but then I could not get a good reinstall out of it. It reinstalled but did not really work well (would not start at startup, for example).

Finally, although I was able to go through the /Library files and delete stuff here and there without causing harm to the system, it is not something everyone should do. I have been messing with computers for 23 or 24 years. (If you count the mainframe computers I programmed on in graduate school, the total is over 30 years.) I have a good enough knowledge of what I am doing to generally not screw things up. But, if you decide to muck around in the system, it really pays to know what you are doing or you can FUBAR your system really quickly.

How I Use My iMac Differently Now

Leopard has something called Spaces which is totally changing how I use the system. Basically it gives you four virtual desktops, and you can have different applications running on these desktops with the ability to easily switch between them. I did not think this would be all that great, but I love it. I run my PIM apps on one desktop, my development apps on another, and my browser and email on another. Switching between them is so easy.

In the past I would close out an app as soon as I was done with it for the moment: I did this because I hate desktop clutter. Now I just keep them all open and on different desktops.

I also now use the super-duper Safari browser as my default. I have not reinstalled Firefox yet, and will take my time before doing so. (I will ultimately need to install it because I like to see how this blog looks on the different browsers, but I am using Safari.) Safari is incredibly fast, and does not crash, whereas the latest versions of Firefox have been a little buggy.

At this point I do not plan to reinstall QuickSilver. I used it primarily for launching applications (and relaunching them repeatedly through the day). Turns out the new Spotlight in Leopard does this just as well, and also turns out that my use of Spaces means that I would have less occasion to use an application launcher anyway.

Wrap-up

Hopefully some of my lessons will be of use to fellow Mac users. If you have any other tips related to this (or any other Leopard comments), I’d love to hear from you.

My Reinstallation of Leopard

The Problem

Addressing The Problem

Some Lessons Learned

How I Use My iMac Differently Now

Wrap-up

Life Advice

Tech Tips

Contacting Me

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