As I blogged over the last few weeks, my upgrade to the latest Mac OS, Tiger, went pretty smoothly. However I had this nagging feeling that things might be even better if I did a clean installation. For one thing, I had been upgrading this machine ever since I got it a couple of years ago, and there were a number of obsolete bits and pieces lying around. I’d also installed many, many version of different applications – all of the flavours of OpenOffice for the Mac, various releases of NetBeans, every dot and dot-dot version of Java, various bits and pieces downloaded with fink – and it was increasingly difficult to figure out which bits I could safely discard. One or two applications hadn’t survived the upgrade to Tiger as well as they should have, and I wanted to give them a fresh start. I’d started to notice a few odd error messages in the console log and when shutting down – messages about xinetd, which had been obsoleted in Tiger. And finally free disk space was down to 8GB out of 60GB, which in today’s calculus is “getting close”. (When I think about how I would have killed for 8GB of disk just a few years ago….)
So I decided to perform a clean installation of Tiger. Overall it went very smoothly, even if some of the steps took a while to complete:
Make sure I had the license information from all of the licensed apps I use – NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, iWork, iLife, PGP, SuperDuper, etc.
Turn off networking, purge caches, delete temporary files.
Clone my hard disk on a partition of my external FireWire disk using SuperDuper; boot from the clone to verify that it’s complete.
Install Tiger from the DVD, carefully choosing the bits and pieces I want (yes to X11, no to some of the more obscure printer drivers and localizations).
Plug the FireWire drive back in and use Migration Assistant to move over just the user files and network settings – NOT the applications.
Still offline, install the various Apple applications.
Now go online and run Software Update several times to pull down all of the updates for OS X, QuickTime, iTunes, iWork, and so forth. Remember to repair permissions after each update.
Install the remaining applications.
Wrestle with the inevitable glitch – in this case, why aren’t the PGP actions appearing on the toolbar for Mail? Discover that I need to shut down Mail and run two commands in a terminal window:
defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 2When happy with the result, make a bootable backup copy with SuperDuper.
The bottom line? More free space, the system feels snappier, no ugly console messages on shutdown. The only frustrating thing is that one particular application is still broken….