Leopard: The Agony of the Update
I could just punt my Macbook Pro right about now.
It’s a good thing I did a full backup last week of my drive using SuperDuper. If you’re thinking about upgrading your Mac to Leopard, here are some words of advice:
Most of you are probably okay with doing just an upgrade, in which case if Flash is working already, you’re in the clear.
But for those of you like me who are especially anal about upgrades and look at them as a time to flush out the crap and do a pristine installation of the new system, I would HIGHLY recommend not reformatting your drive to *HFS+, Case Sensitive, Journaled*…. this is a new (to me) option available to you with Leopard. Thing is, Adobe CS3 — it doesn’t like the Case-sensitive part AT ALL.I did the clean install and used Migration Assistant to get my files and preferences back into place. I kept trying to launch Flash and had nothing but issues. Then I did a completely clean installation and tried to manually install Flash again. But that kept resulting in a “Supported System Error.” Like a good boy scout, I reported it to Adobe, but then it got me thinking that it was my choice in File Systems for the disk… so… round 3, I reformatted to *HFS+, Journaled* and Flash installed just magically.
So… freaking… annoyed.
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Actually, I don’t think apple reccomends this setup for this very reason: developers count on the mac acting the way it typically does. In 10.4 (you could select case sensitive as an option in formatting your drive) there are a lot of issues as to why you don’t want to do this on your primary partition (there was a warning in 10.4). The number one is that developers don’t take this in account. The basic developer setup is to make another partition and set that as case sensitive for things like SVN (subversion) where you could run into some issues if you create two files on the repository that have a different case but the same name. That is a pain to deal with on the typical case insensitive format.
So, keep things case insensitive for the main drive partition but, make another for for stuff that may need it.
Thanks for writing in, Steven!
I had no recollection at all about the option for this formatting in Tiger, but after posting this I got a few emails about it, and I then checked my older 17″ PowerBook (my wife’s) and ran Disk Utility, and sure enough — it was there all along.
I’m pretty sure I never read up on the warning about formatting back then, but I also never noticed that case-sensitive was an option before, either. So it’s completely my ignorance.
Your assertion that developers don’t think about it is absolutely valid, though. I asked the technical support at Adobe when I followed up on the support case, and they outright wrote to me in my response that he checked with the QA team and they report that they never checked the CS3 or Studio 8 products against Case-Sensitive, Journaled HFS+ file format.
I guess it’s interesting how some applications worked despite the format change (Camino, for example) and some don’t. But it’s my own bad for not going far enough in researching this before I hit the panic blog post button.
Umm, about Time Machine: Any thoughts about how to format the backup drive?
I have a case-insensitive Leopard installation (by default/accident) and since I’m planning to use CS3 it’s apparently just as well.
But I’m also expecting to do some java and/or c++ programming.
Am I looking at partitions on both main mac drive and backup drive?
I formatted my Maxtor 200GB One-Touch drive to HFS+, Case-Insensitive. Thing is… I formatted both the drive and the device (you can select both from Disk Utility).
I didn’t have any problems whatsoever with Time Machine once I did this, but I noticed when I formatted the “drive” that the “device” still said it was formatted as FAT32, even though the drive, when selected, was HFS+.
I’ve also read that others have had some problems getting drives to work in Time Machine, but I can’t complain at all about it, thus far… other than it seemed to take up an awful lot of space on its initial backup, but it’s shrunk since then.
Of course, I haven’t had to revert to anything yet… so we’ll see.