Snow Leopard upgrade experience

Updated my main mac from 10.5.11 (required to run the server admin
tools for my brand spanking new Xserve to be delivered tomorow morning :-)

First the good news (and this time in bytes to remove that confusion
about what a kilobyte/megabyte is).

Before: 294 895 489 024 bytes used.
After : 281 475 276 800 bytes used.

Difference: 13 420 212 224 bytes. So roughly 13 gigs savings in my case.

This is after 10.6.1 was applied and Xcode installed over the old one.

(My old trusty calculator couldn't handle such large numbers, had to use
Calculator.App :-)


Now, the bad news:

Disk copy took about 2 hours to make a full bootable backup (Time
machine isn't bootable).

Then proceed with install on first drive. Seemed to work, but it stalled
during the automated shutdown after it failed to unmount the few NFS
drives that had been mounted.

Forcing a reboot (power switch) resulted in the Mac rebooting in "clean
install mode", asking me for language etc. Not a happy puppy.

Rebooted on the backup drive, and then proceeded with the install on the
first drive, and it then proceeded with success.

Anyone know if hacks to give stacks in dock proper readable colours and
no transparency ?

Update: I specified I wanted ROsetta installed. Seems it didn't install
it because when I first launched a PPC application, it prompted me to
install Rosetta ! Perhaps it was because of my failed first install.

On 2009/11/03 1:44 PM thepixelfreak wrote:
> On 2009-11-01 19:01:06 -0800, JF Mezei <>
> said:
>
>> First the good news (and this time in bytes to remove that confusion
>> about what a kilobyte/megabyte is).
>>
>> Before: 294 895 489 024 bytes used.
>> After : 281 475 276 800 bytes used.
>
> Mostly smoke and mirrors. Apple now considers a MB to be 1000^3, where
> the rest of the computer science world continues to understand a MB as
> 1024^3.

It is not smoke and mirrors. 13 420 212 224 bytes is 13 420 212 224
bytes period, a rather large savings.

Using MB to be 1000^3 the savings is 13.4 GB
Using MB to be 1024^3 the savings is 12.5 GB

How can you believe savings that large an amount of space as being smoke
and mirrors.

--
Larry I. Gusaas
Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan Canada
Website: http://larry-gusaas.com
"An artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs." - Edgard Varese

thepixelfreak <> wrote:

> On 2009-11-01 19:01:06 -0800, JF Mezei <> said:
>
> > First the good news (and this time in bytes to remove that confusion
> > about what a kilobyte/megabyte is).
> >
> > Before: 294 895 489 024 bytes used.
> > After : 281 475 276 800 bytes used.
>
> Mostly smoke and mirrors. Apple now considers a MB to be 1000^3, where
> the rest of the computer science world continues to understand a MB as
> 1024^3.

That's exactly why JF quoted bytes - not megabytes. That change has
nothing to do with the figures quoted above. It can have to do with some
figures that other people might have quoted, but not with those above.

> Granted some savings come from not installing every printer driver
> under the sun _AND_ not having Universal binaries.

A fair amount, at least for the printer drivers, which used to take up
an awful lot of space, but still not as much as the above-quoted 13GB
(or 12GB, depending whose definition you use). Heck, I don't recall that
an entire 10.5 install took 13 GB. Don't have a clean one handy at the
moment to check, but if it was over 13GB, it sure wasn't much over. It
is hard to save more than 100% of the space used; that would take a lot
of smoke. I have tickets for a local Penn&Teller show this Saturday;
maybe they will have an equally impressive trick.

I posit a much simpler explanation, one that has come up here at least
once before and really has little directly to do with Snow Leopard, even
though it can happen as an indirect consequence of a Snow Leopard
upgrade.

I bet there were a lot of temporary files cleaned up during the install.
Printing is particularly prone to leave lots of such "crud" behind to
build up indefinitely, but other processes can do the same.

If that's the case, then as I said, it would have little directly to do
with Snow Leopard. Doing a clean reinstall of Leopard would have had a
simillar efect. Or one could just find and clean up the old temporary
files. I think I recall someone posting a short script here for that.

Ideally the regular maintenance scripts would take care of much of that.
Even more ideally, most software would do better about cleaning up after
itself in the first place, at least for normal termination. Maybe life
wil be like that someday. :-(

--
Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgment.
domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain

In article <2009110311445575249-not@dotcom>, thepixelfreak <>
wrote:

> Mostly smoke and mirrors. Apple now considers a MB to be 1000^3, where
> the rest of the computer science world continues to understand a MB as
> 1024^3.

But the consumer world considers it to be 1000^3. Furthermore, so do disk
manufacturers.

--
Member National Rifle Association
Member American Civil Liberties Union
Member Human Rights Campaign

Richard Maine wrote:

> I bet there were a lot of temporary files cleaned up during the install.

Yeah. That system had been up for quite some time already, so there
would have been a fair amount of crud. Also, it is likely that there
were large page/swap files that got zapped at reboot.

BTW, I checked the temperature and when iddle, the air coming out the
back of the MacPro really does seem cooler.

Isn't Snow Leopard the first OS to come out after the Xeon Nehalem
generation ? Perhaps they have begun to use energy saving capabilities
of that chip. I know that Apple advertises significant energy savings
for the Xserve (same techology).

In article <2009110311445575249-not@dotcom>,
thepixelfreak <> wrote:

> On 2009-11-01 19:01:06 -0800, JF Mezei <> said:
>
> > First the good news (and this time in bytes to remove that confusion
> > about what a kilobyte/megabyte is).
> >
> > Before: 294 895 489 024 bytes used.
> > After : 281 475 276 800 bytes used.
>
> Mostly smoke and mirrors. Apple now considers a MB to be 1000^3, where
> the rest of the computer science world continues to understand a MB as
> 1024^3.

Except for large parts of the hardware side of the business.

Hard drive makers have been documenting drive capacity this way for the
better part of a decade, at least. It's not just Apple deciding one
morning to confuse the rest of the world.

> Granted some savings come from not installing every printer driver
> under the sun _AND_ not having Universal binaries.

In article <2009110311445575249-not@dotcom>,
thepixelfreak <> wrote:

> On 2009-11-01 19:01:06 -0800, JF Mezei <> said:
>
> > First the good news (and this time in bytes to remove that confusion
> > about what a kilobyte/megabyte is).
> >
> > Before: 294 895 489 024 bytes used.
> > After : 281 475 276 800 bytes used.
>
> Mostly smoke and mirrors. Apple now considers a MB to be 1000^3, where
> the rest of the computer science world continues to understand a MB as
> 1024^3.

Oh, hey, did you notice where he showed the count in bytes instead of MB
or GB? So base 10 or base 2 makes no difference.


Steve

First hour of really using the mac since the upgrade:

Numbers has had a spinning ball requiring "Force Quit".

And now Firefox has a spinning ball in a "browse" button to select a
file to upload.

Also, is it my imagination of does stuffit expander now add the text
"Folder" to the name of a folder ?

for instance:

091103_TN_BA242-BC7181-Interrogs_ABR Folder

Did snow leopard update that application or is "Folder" now added under
the table by the OS even when the application doesn't specify it ?

In article <00aa403e$0$6703$>,
JF Mezei <> wrote:

> First hour of really using the mac since the upgrade:

Recommended reading (both before and after update to SnowLeopard):

SnowChecker at http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/snowchecker
(Data from http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/)

HTH

Marc

--
remove bye and from mercial to get valid e-mail
<http://www.heusser.com>