Updating to Mac OS X Leopard

I recently updated my Power Mac G5 from Mac OS X Tiger to Leopard. I used the update option offered by the Leopard installation DVD which did a reasonable job. The process took about two hours and the machine started up without any problems afterwards. However, there were a few problems I had to sort out over time:

  1. The new automounter maps /home to an automount map called auto_home by default. If such a map is not available the directory /home will appear to be empty. Commenting out the according line in the configuration file /etc/auto_master fixes that problem.
  2. Emacs didn’t work after the update. It died with a Fatal malloc_jumpstart() error on startup. It seems that the update didn’t overwrite the Tiger Emacs binaries properly. Installing the Security Update 2008-002 fixes that problem fortunately because it contains an update for Emacs.
  3. Software Update refused to install the latest version of QuickTime with the rather cryptic error message The update “QuickTime” can’t be saved. The problem could however easily be fixed by removing the contents of the /Library/Updates/QuickTime folder.
  4. Safari had been made the default browser. This can however be changed easily using Safari’s Preferences dialog.
  5. The system didn’t know my private root certificate anymore. I had to reimport it using the program Keychain Access in the utilities folder.
  6. The configuration for my (network attached) printer was removed during the update. Re-adding it was however easy as usual.

I hope these hints will help other people to sort out similar update problems.

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One Response to Updating to Mac OS X Leopard

  1. iain says:

    Welcome to Leopard. It’s substantially less broken now than at release.

    3. Ah! I’ve been seeing that error message but I haven’t got round to trying to fix it, as I don’t care about QuickTime. Thanks for the info.

    5. You can install a trusted cert systemwide with “/usr/bin/security add-trusted-cert -d /path/to/cert.pem”. A good /path/to is /System/Library/OpenSSL/certs as this is the default location for the SSL library.

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