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OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

I finally managed to update my Mac OS X 10.5 to the latest version - Snow Leopard. There is a lot of information about this on the web so I don't want to go into too much detail.

The basic upgrade via the CD was simple. No problems there. Except of the gained disk space and a slightly changed behavior of the dock items when you keep the mouse button pressed I actually haven't noticed anything outstanding yet.

Unfortunately, there were a few things which needed additional care after the upgrade:
  • Java 5 is gone. Well, there is still a 1.5 symbolic link in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions, but it just point to the 1.6 JDK. WTF? As Java developer I needed my JDK 5 back. One way to solve this is described here.
  • Next up was MacPorts. Given my addiction to command line tools I actually use a broad range of Unix tools on my Mac which I get via MacPorts. After the upgrade you have to completely replace your MacPorts installation :( The good news is that it is not too hard - see here. MacPorts needs Xcode installed. Unfortunately, the upgrade removes the old version without replacing it with the new. Instead you have to insert the Snow Leopard CD again and install Xcode from the optional package directory on the CD. While on it you should also reinstall Rosetta (also on the CD).
  • The reason for reinstalling Rosetta is that without it TextMate stopped working.
Ok, now I almost had everything back I used to have. One more problem was MySQL. I had an instance which I installed via a Mac installer package downloaded from the MySQL homepage. Unfortunately, this instance stopped working after the upgrade and I decided to use MacPorts to install a new version - mysql5-macports.

Last, but not least, there are at the moment two programs I am aware of which don't work anymore and where I don't have a upgrade solution. Luckily both tools are not so important to me:
  • JarInspector 
  • Shimo (there might be an upgrade for them, but in Snow Leopard the network configuration options have changed so that I can use now the build in network manager)
Enjoy!
--Hardy

Old comments

2009-10-28Hardy Ferentschik
Turns out there is one more problem. zlib of MacPorts won't install out of the box (it's a transitive dependency of a package I want to install). Seems to be a problem with the fact that Snow Leopard is not 64 bit default. Anyways, if you see the following error messages:

can't open input file: /opt/local/lib/libz.dylib (No such file or directory)

just run:

sudo port install zlib +universal
2009-11-22Anonymous
Holy cow - I just started using macports and was totally stuck with this error on my macbook air (still running Leopard) and had to load the older Xcode (3.1.4?) cause apple is only offering the one for Snow Leopard on the main ADC website, anyways a few searches and not hard to find, but this zlib thing was stopping my macports install of dosbox - so thank you, thank you, thank you!
2009-11-27Anonymous
Thanks for the extra comment about zlib. That's exactly the problem I've been having and that's exactly what I needed to fix it.
2011-02-28Unknown
Since apple removed the java cocoa bindings JarInspector looks to be dead and gone... but hopefully this is a good replacement:
Jarzilla
2011-02-28Hardy Ferentschik
Thanks for the tip with Jarzilla. Seems to be a great replacement for JarInspector.