Well – I am not quite finished replacing my old dual 500MHz G4 PowerMac running 10.3 (Panther) with the new 20″ iMac dual core monster running 10.5.1 (Leopard) yet, but getting very close.
Here are the remaining issues:
1) Plucker Desktop 1.6.0.1 (yeah, no one has touched the Mac version since 2003!) has a bug in the Python fetch scripts that prevents it from going and getting new web pages for later viewing on my PalmOS PDA. I suspect this will be an easy fix once a Python expert looks in detail at the error message. Update: many thanks to JeromeE for pointing this out, it is trivially easy to fix Plucker to work on Leopard.
su - admin
cd /Applications/Plucker.app/Contents/Resources/parser/python/PyPlucker
sudo vi Spider.py Parser.py TextParser.py PluckerDocs.py helper/doc_compress.py helper/doc_compress.py helper/prc.py
insert new first or second line, "# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-"
2) Palm Desktop 4.2.1d no longer works on my 1.5GHz PowerPC G4 12″ PowerBook… binary incompatibility – which is odd – same binary worked fine on same laptop in 10.3.9 and on both PowerMac (10.3.9) and on Intel based iMac (10.5.1)… I sense it is something silly that needs to be tweaked to make it work.
3) Stuffit Expander (which I loathe – but it’s the only way to extract Stuffit files with a .sit extension) is no longer included in the default OS installs from Apple. This is easy to fix, but mildly annoying. Stuffit Expander v12 is available for free (nagware) from Smith Micro (previously Allume and/or Aladdin)… annoying that it collects your email for spamming you, but at least one can still extract the few remaining Stuffit files out there (thankfully there are fewer and fewer these days).
4) The new Mail.app (v3.1) included with Leopard does not work with my new employer’s IMAP server (CommunigatePro v5.2) and that is very annoying. I had to download Thunderbird for work email reading. At work I use Mail.app v2.1.2 on Tiger just fine, and Mail.app 1.3 in Panther worked fine too… so the IMAP incompatibility was definitely introduced with the new Mail.app version. Update: Mail.app problem fixed. Turns out to be an odd certificate handling problem at work, and Mail.app v3.1 can be trained to handle the certificates. Mail.app now works with CommunigatePro (yippea).
5) Upgrading my AddressBook database and Mail.app rules based filters from Panther (10.3.9) to Leopard (10.5.1) directly has proven to be a nightmare. The file formats and XML constructs are different enough to break things. Furthermore, a test/trial .Mac membership has not helped because .Mac no longer supports 10.3 (Panther) at all!!! I am piping the data for Mail.app rules and AddressBook through a 10.4 host at work and that seems to be working fine, but I managed to wipe some of my data trying to leap-frog from Panther to Leopard. Back-ups are your friend. For the record, my lovely wife simply upgraded to Tiger and then to Leopard a few months apart and everything went smoothly with no loss of data at all.
Things I love about Leopard:
The ability to use System Preferences to disable the accursed and poorly placed CapsLock key (this was also a feature of Tiger, but not of Panther).
Integral Screen Sharing over VNC makes remote management and support for non-techies way easier.
TimeMachine (backups made fun) make it easier to get non-techies doing frequent backups.
Korn shell (the one true shell) is now part of the OS (possibly was in Tiger too). No more PDKsh.
Terminal preferences are vastly improved over previous versions, and UNIX geeks like me are much happier.
Previewing (read only) MS proprietary formats (.doc, .ppt, .xls) is much better and easier. BTW – I loaded iWork too and so far I have no need for MS Office anymore.
I have not even played with spaces yet!
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