I just spent much of the day upgrading and re-configuring my Mac to run Jaguar, or Mac OS X 10.2, the forthcoming major upgrade to Mac OS X. While the upgrade of the OS itself went extremely smoothly, the aftermath kept this blog off the air for nearly 24 hours.
I chose to do a clean installation, archiving the previous system installation, and re-using the users and network settings. I think that’s probably going to be the most common approach that “power users” use, because we’ve all mucked around with our system, and doing a clean installation is always a good thing to do from time-to-time, even with an OS as solid as Mac OS X has been for me.
The actually installation took less than an hour of effort (mostly waiting), but then the real work began. I’ve hacked up my system quite a bit, installing a plethora of additional software tools and toys. In particular, I use the MySQL database running on my Mac to drive this site, and the MySQL installation got archived by the upgrade process.
I’ll post more about the process I went through (or rather, what the right steps would have been), but for now, I’ll simply say that Jaguar is running smoothly on my system, and the performance boost that the upgrade has brought is quite noticeable and pleasant.