't Bijstere spoor

I just got my copy of snow leopard in the mail, so I decided to upgrade my laptop. After doing a full backup, I didn't turn out to be as easy as I thought.

The installation process quickly showed a little yellow triangle, indicating I didn't have any startup disks. I quickly remembered I had a dual boot to Ubuntu, and used Refit, which is basically an alternative boot menu, to get into Linux and the likes.

So I looked up the removal instructions, but unfortunately this didn't change the situation. I then read that OS/X will restore the standard EFI loader (if that's the correct terminology), by opening the Disk Utility, and making the partition slightly smaller and bigger again. Trying this I got an odd error, namely "MediaKit reports no such partition". No dice.

So I ended up booting an Ubuntu Live CD, removing the linux ext3 and swap partitions there. After this was done, I was able to resize the main OS/X partition, which eventually fixed the problem.

If you ran into similar problems, I'm hoping there's enough keywords in here for you to find this solution :).

After all that installing Snow Leopard is a bit of an anti-climax. As advertised, not a lot changed, and I've yet to see a noticeable speed difference. The OS is using less disk-space, but 29 euro is still a high price for a glorified 'rm' statement.

I do notice small notification improvements here and there, and Address Book.app now supports CardDAV, which is nice.

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining too much, because I actually really like the new version of os/x. I wanted to cover a bunch of problems so people might know its not just them.

First, my personal favourite improvements.

The terminal

I'm especially happy that some time was spent improving the terminal application. Half my day I spend in that application, and any small improvement is welcome there. The most important being tabs (yessss) and an always running ssh-agent (which integrates with the keychain).

I ran across a bunch of problems as well ..

Flash upload stops working

Since we deal at FileMobile a lot with uploads of large/huge files.. we use a Flash uploader. It completely stopped working in leopard and from what I hear an update of the flashplayer is in the works.

Windows magically disappear using spaces

Spaces is a nice tool and i feel like it could help productivity.. but when you're switching between a few spaces sometimes windows get completely lost and the applications need a restart to re-appear.

Terminal won't change the background color

I'm fairly sure this has to do with the fact that I used a background image for my terminal in tiger; which is a feature that has been removed in leopard. I really dislike the default black-on-white, but I couldn't change my background color anymore. The solution for this was to simply remove:

From my home directory.

My key-bindings for page-up and page-down are lost in the Terminal.

I haven't felt like trying this yet, but I assume I simply have to follow my previous steps, if not.. I'll post about it later..

Airport up and down

Not sure if this is the OS or the airport, but its been shaky.. Hope this gets improved with an update of some sort.