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I've got a G5 powermac running panther and I've been very leery of upgrading to newer versions of OSX. It's not because I haven't been intrigued by the new features or that I'm put off by the sticker price; it's purely because I currently have a fully functional OS. The thought of an upgrade gone bad is enough to keep me up at night.

I'm a network admin from the 'if it ain't broke' school of thinking. I really would like to upgrade but I'd need to buy multiple large hard drives first in order to back up my existing data. Then just to be safe, create a disk image of my current set up. Then I might consider taking the plunge. Paranoid to be sure, but I've been burned by less.

By the way, because I haven't seen it addressed anywhere, is upgrading from panther to leopard supported? I imagine it is, but all the upgrade stories I've read involve tiger to leopard, nothing from older versions. Leopard is really tempting, but I wouldn't want to trouble shoot that mess if something went wrong (don't know OSX at that low a level).

Any tips?

"I'm a network admin from the 'if it ain't broke' school of thinking. I really would like to upgrade ...
... is upgrading from panther to leopard supported?"
MechaShiva

First, don't "upgrade", every Admin should know this, whether you're are doing this for a user or for your server, import it back, if need be.
The remnants of an upgrade will bite you sooner or later.
- Look at Windows and the whole upgrade mentality (sorry guys, it's true). It breaks things.

Clean installs save time, doesn't seem so at the time, but it will.

You'll feel better.

Oh, and that G5, you'll be blown away - just with a clean install (of whatever you choose) - the speed improvements alone will convince you you'll have done the prudent thing.

G5:

http://www.apple.com/support/powermac/

10.5:

http://www.macosxhints.com/index.php?topic=system105

General Troubleshooting:

http://forums.osxfaq.com/viewtopic.php?t=7269

hylas

Would Leopard run well on a mac mini G4 1.4Ghz with 1GB RAM machine?

I dont see why it shouldn't ...

I'm running a hacked osx leopard server on a 450mhz cube with stock 16mb ati card / 300GB hdisk and 1.5GB of SDR

Leopard should install on anything 868mhz and above (800mhz for server) and I've found leopard server to be faster than tiger server as a whole on my arcane setup.

Only problem I have is the hitech driver for leopard hasnt been released yet... this driver allows very old macs such as the cube and MDD etc G4s to see above the 128GB partition but your mac mini shouldn't be effected. If the transparency is too much for you (or in my case too slow) you can simply turn it off... but in general I've heard fantastic results with 800mhz+ and above.

The Ars Technica review was done on three different Macs, the oldest one was a 1Ghz powerbook. Unfortunately the author didn't go into performance details on that machine other than saying that "The good news, I suppose, is that Leopard certainly isn't hamstrung on PowerPC Macs."

I dunno what exactly that was supposed to mean, but I certainly hope that if Leopard was frustratingly slow on the powerbook that it would have been in the review.


Thanks Nossie, that's making me feel a bit better about my own upgrade decision. (slowest G4 Mini with Tiger) It's not making me feel good about my extra-slow posting speed though. B^)

Edited 2007-11-15 13:28

I installed Leopard on my G4 Powerbook ( 512 Ram 1ghz). It works fine. So you shouldn't have a problem. Given your spec is slightly higher, you should be fine. Well worth the upgrade IMHO.