Things I’ve learned

[avram]

Lesson 1: Swapping internal hard drives on a TiBook is a painstaking process. The worst part is not the eight screws that have to be removed in order. No, the worst part is that flimsy plastic hinge that’s the drive’s data connection to the motherboard. You really are supposed to pull that thing off one drive and stick it on the next without breaking it. Yes, it’s possible, but it’s nerve-wracking.

Lesson 2: When installing MacOS X 10.3 (Panther) on a blank drive, there really is a field that asks you to enter a “short name” (Unix user name). Don’t miss this if you don’t want to get stuck with the default (your first and last names run together) because you’ll be porting over a bunch of stuff from the backup of your old drive, which you’d set up with a different username.

Lesson 3: If you wind up learning Lesson 2 the hard way, just give up and do a fresh reinstall right away. Don’t bother trying to change your username with NetInfo Manager. It really is possible to get OSX into a state where there is no recognized administrative user, nobody with the authority to run su, and no user with the authority to give any user that authority. This is bad. Fortunately you’ll have a fresh backup to restore from. Right?

The good news: Panther is noticeably faster than Jaguar. Even (from what I’ve read) on the same hardware; faster still with a faster hard drive. I’m a happy computer user. Mail.app is actually usable now. At the moment, my only complaint is that Fruit Menu isn’t behaving.

Comments

OS10.3(panther)

[jcb.livejournal.com]

you should try it on a g4 powerbook with 1.5 gigs of ram. it's so gangster.