Jaguar Upgrade: Post-Install Setup

This is the fourth in a series of posts I’m writing about my upgrade to Mac OS X 10.2 “Jaguar”.

While this may not make sense for other people, I divide the post-installation configuration tasks into two parts: fixing issues with my Unix software, and everything else. This posting covers the everything else, since that’s likely to be more interesting. Tomorrow we’ll cover the Unix side.

Before you read this discussion of the work required after doing an Archive & Install, you should read the excellent article at Macworld, which covers these issues more generally. I’m going to get into the weeds, especially with some of the tasks required to re-enable Unix-based tools like PHP and MySQL, which most people won’t care about.

First, though, a warning about one recommendation given in the Macworld article. In talking about what to copy over from your archived .../Library/Printers folder, they suggest that if you’ve previously installed Faxstf, you should copy over the SmithMicro folder from the archives, and put it into your /Library/Printers directory.

When I did this and subsequently tried to re-add my printers (see below), Print Center would crash about 5 seconds after clicking the Add button. After trying this 5-6 times, three different ways, I finally thought to look in the Console (/Applications/Utilities/Console). Lo and behold, there were error messages from Faxstf trying to access a resource which was no longer where it expected; the Archive & Install process had moved it into the archive. Once I removed the SmithMicro folder from /Library/Printers, I had no further difficulties with Print Center.

So let’s get to the things I needed to update. Although the Preserve Users and Network Settings option preserved the vast majority of my settings, there are a few new or changed things in Jaguar that required resetting some preferences and tools:

• Turn on appropriate services in the Sharing preference panel
  I had had Personal Web Sharing (Apache) and Remote Login (ssh) turned on in Mac OS X 10.1, and the other services turned off. When I booted into Jaguar, all of my sharing services were turned off. So I turned on Apache and ssh. There’s also new options in the Sharing panel, e.g., Windows file sharing and printer sharing, which you might want to consider enabling.
• Re-add all printers
  Jaguar includes an entirely new printing subsystem under the hood, as well as updated drivers for a wide range of printers. After the upgrade, I had no printers available, the upgrade had removed them. It took me about 5 minutes to re-create my printer configuration, adding an HP Deskjet and Laserjet using the Print Center application.
• Re-enable the Scripts menuExtra
  Jaguar apparently disables all installed menuExtras (and most third-party ones are incompatible with Jaguar; hopefully this will be fixed quickly), but re-enabling the Scripts menu, an Apple component which provides menubar access to AppleScripts and other scripts, was fairly simple. Just double-click (or otherwise open) the /Applications/AppleScript/ScriptMenu.menu menuExtra.

Another activity after booting into Mac OS X 10.2 for the first time was to disabled a fair number of third-party software components. I’ve installed a lot of software to make myself more comfortable in Mac OS X, and some of that functionality is now in Mac OS 10.2. I knew or suspected that some of the third-party components would conflict in some way with Jaguar. Among them:

• Contextual menu items
  These can be found in ~/Library/Contextual Menu Items. To disable the ones I suspected, I created a ~/Library/Contextual Menu Items (Disabled) folder and moved them there. (I love having long file names — that folder name was too long in Mac OS 9!) The ones I disabled were:
  • Bare Bones Open With — there is a new Open With command in Jaguar’s Finder, and I want to see how well it works.
  • Zingg! — another Open With contextual menu that is quite excellent.
• Login items
  Login items are found in the System Preferences panel of the same name. Disabling login items is as simple as selecting them and clicking the Remove button. I turned off a few items, for different reasons:
  • SuperGetInfoHelper — At least for now, I’m turning off everything for SuperGetInfo, to see how well I like the new functionality in Jaguar. Especially now that it’s been updated for Jaguar, I’m pretty sure I’ll turn it back on, which is easily done in SGI’s own preferences.
  • Transport Monitor and Palm Desktop Background — These two helpers are part of Palm Desktop. At least the Transport Monitor needs the Palm Desktop kernel extensions installed, and I’m not installing any third-party kernel extensions until they’ve been updated and certified for Jaguar.
  • StuffIt Magic Menu — another menuExtra which doesn’t work (yet) in Jaguar. May as well turn it off.
  • VersionTracker Pro — this application scans your hard disk and helps you locate out-of-date software. It’s crashing about 10 seconds into its scanning under Jaguar, so it’s clearly not compatible.
• Preference panes
  Preference panes can be found in the ~/Library/PreferencePanes directory. I used the same technique for disabling these:
  • ASM — this prefPane gives an error when you try to open it in Jaguar. Additionally, it puts an application menu in the menubar, but menuExtras are currently broken in Jaguar (which sucks).
  • SambaSharing — this is replaced by functionality built into Jaguar, at least for my needs.
  • SharePoints — not replaced, but with the changes to sharing, I’d like to wait for an update.
  • Silk — with changes to graphics and font rendering, it seems like a good item to turn off until an update appears. Plus this was a hack to enable font smoothing in Carbon applications that hadn’t been update to do so. With all the updates coming out for Jaguar, that will soon be a problem of the past.
  • sunShield — this is a firewall configuration tool, and I feel like the new preferences in Jaguar will handle my needs fine.
• Screen saver modules
  • Flurry — I noticed during the beta for Jaguar that Apple was including one of my favorite third-party screen savers, Flurry, in the base OS. Sure enough, in the final Jaguar GM, Flurry is still being included. While I think this is wonderful, it means I have a Flurry saver in the standard OS installation location, and a second Flurry saver in my ~/Library/Screen Savers directory. I don’t know if this could cause a conflict, but it surely could lead to using an obsolete version. So I removed the copy I had installed in my own Screen Savers folder.

These are the things which I’ve done so far. I’m quite sure I’ll find other things, and will note them down as I fix them. For example, I haven’t touched my Internet Plug-Ins, although that’s deliberate. For now, I’m running with the default set, to see what works out-of-the-box with Jaguar.

Tomorrow we’ll get seriously technical, and talk about what needs to be updated on the Unix side of the fence.