I still havent received my Tiger-package but got a bit panicky because it is released as a DVD and at least one of our recent iMacs (the older ones do not even have build in firewire, let alone enough RAM) cannot read DVDs. That’s not a major problem as one can always send the DVD back and ask for CDs instead (and wait even longer) or you can follow this trick (using Firewire target disk mode). Jan suggested another approach : make the DVD into a dmg image, connect an iPod, erase with DiskUtility its hard disk and use the Restore option of DiskUtility to copy the dmg onto it. Then choose the iPod as StartUp Disk and restart and everything works nicely.

As he went through the trouble of setting up his iPod, I merely borrowed it and did an Archive/Install of Tiger on the redundant iMac.All went well and afterwards you can hardly see the difference with Panther except in the top right corner where there is the SpotLight icon (a feature I do like and will use often) and in the lower left corner the Dashboard icon (a feature which still has to convince me).

Anyway, I wanted to check out as quickly as possible a comment (also from jan) that there is a new Tiger only version of TexShop out which syncs nicely between the PDF-file and the source. As it requires some extra packages using i-Installer I took the opportunity to update my TeX-system.

As they predict bad weather for the rest of the weekend I thought “well, why not just begin the Panther/Tiger switch on my iBook using the iPod trick as well”. But first I wanted to backup the latest Tiger+TeX version using Carbon Copy Cloner. Over the last year this has become such a routine operation (backing up to a slick Porsche designed 250Gb HD) that I was quite surprised that the computer halted after typing in the super-user password. Forcing CCC to quit and restarting didn’t solve the problem so it was time to do a Google on “Carbon Copy Cloner Tiger” to find out that other (quicker) people had already experienced the same.

As making a bootable backup is crucial for me I had to find a way round this and fortunately found the Tiger balm post. Here’s the hack :

- go to the Applications folder
- open Terminal and type sudo open
– drag CCC to the Terminal-window
– type return and provide superuser password
– open CCC and fill in Source and Target disks as usual
– it works!

Rumours are that Mike Bombich will rewrite CCC shortly to fix this problem. Let’s just hope that I don’t find too many other applications behaving unexpectedly (in the 2 hours I’m onto Tiger I also found Remote Desktop not to work at all but then it’s an old 1.2 version so maybe Apple took this chance to force people to upgrade (and pay heavily) as they seem to do with hardware (someone should come up with a way to get the first generation iMacs onto Tiger!)

apple, google, mac, Tiger