Worked my way through a bit more of my system, and found another thing that’s not very happy with Leopard. Turns out that the MySQL Community Server (the free one you can download from mysql.com) really doesn’t work on Leopard, and it seems that it’s primarily the Preference Pane, startup item, and socket locations that need tweaking. Actually, people seem to be saying you should just ditch the preference pane and the startup item entirely. Apparently during the upgrade my data disappeared, too, which is somewhat entertaining. It was all testing data, and I can easily pull it from the production sources again (or even boot my backup drive and dump it from there.)

At this point, I’m probably going to just install the macports version of mysql (and postgresql) and use that. The Mysql.com version was nice because it included the StartupItem and a nice Preference Pane to control the service, but that was, really, its only benefit.

For an idea, simply searching on Google for “mysql leopard” will give you a number of useful and relevant items.

I’ve spent a weekend with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, now, including a couple aborted attempts at installing it, and I think I can safely say I’m liking it. I tend to shy away from *.0 releases, primarily because they never have all the bugs worked out. For the most part, I’m impressed at how 10.5.0 is. Sure, there’s a couple rough edges, but I expect they will be addressed in point releases over the next couple months.

By far my biggest problem was getting Leopard installed. It had been long enough since I upgraded from Panther (10.3) to Tiger (10.4), that I had forgotten all the good advice and experience. My first attempt was an in-place upgrade (choose “Upgrade” from the install types). Due to my ignorance, I had left a number of relatively “hacky” things installed before the upgrade that wouldn’t work post-upgrade. Once I restored my 10.4 system and pulled out the hacks, things worked much better. And, while I’m making a point to go into some detail here about these problems, the overall experience was actually very good. (My final system, for the record, was installed with the “Archive & Install” option, not the “Upgrade” option.)

Really, my biggest complaint about the upgrade was that it took a couple hours for the install, and then several hours of Spotlight re-indexing my HD. Starting the upgrade before going to bed cured me of having to wait for it, though. I imagine a current-generation MacBook or MacBook Pro would take much less time for the install.

Continue reading “Some thoughts on Leopard” →