A Shivering Snow Leopard

2009 Sept 18 at 14:12 » Tagged as :macbook, lame, sqlite,

Apple's much hyped OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard is here. I didn't bother to update from Tiger to Leopard and there was a pre release discount available, so I thought of grabbing it and started off on a long and tedious process that left me feeling like a fool. Apple's online store in the US ships only to addresses with in the US. Similarly the store in the UK ships only to UK addresses and the one in Singapore only ships within Singapore. Sri Lanka supposedly has three authorized agents for Apple products but I seriously doubt if Apple Inc is even aware of their existence. Come to think of it, Steve Jobs and other blokes at Apple might be vaguely aware of a place call Mexico and another called Canada but they are blissfully unaware of the world outside (still trying to figure out how macs ended up being manufactured in China). So it's no surprise that we don't have an official apple store for Sri Lanka. I ordered from the US one giving the address of a friend in New York. That was on the 26th of August. My friend re posted it when he got his hands on it and it arrived in Colombo yesterday. Today I tried to upgrade my system and now I am beginning to regret it. After backing up, changing the boot device and going through the first few steps of the installer, I was presented with this very annoying message:

Install Error

That's right, the installer doesn't like the partition system. Less than a month ago, the drive on my macbook pulled a hamstring when I replaced it, I created three partitions, intending to restore the existing tiger installation on one of them, I planned to put Fedora on the second (but didn't because the Fedora DVD wouldn't boot on the macbook (more on that later)) and third was kept aside to install Leopard or Snow Leopard. Apparently the partition table type cannot now be changed without losing all the data on the drive. Very annoying but I decided to go ahead with it cause I have bakups. The bakup was created with rsync (yeah I am a linux man), in hindsight, it would have been much better to use superduper instead cause at the 'migrate your old stuff' stage, the installer didn't detect the contents of the external drive on which the bakups were placed. I said never mind and skipped it. It was only after booting up that I realized what a fool I've been. iPhoto, one of the most usefull products on OS X is missing. Yeah right iPhoto, which is part of iLife is bundled with all new Macs but if you lose your copy you need to cough up another USD 79 for it.