MacOS 10.5 (Leopard) Advice from Smith IT

Here's what Smith IT's testing of pre-release copies of the next version of MacOS has revealed:

Words of wisdom:

• With any new operating system release (Windows, Mac, other), you are MUCH better off doing a fresh install rather than an upgrade over an existing system.
• UNSANITY's Application Enahancer (a common third-party tool on 10.4) is known to break the upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5 right in the middle of the upgrade.  This is very bad.  See the note above.  Why take the chance?

What DOESN'T work:

• Notes client 7.0.2 installer (see below)
• Connecting to Novel for file access from Finder using AFP protocol (see workaround below)
• WiFi access on umd-secure/umd-secure-fast using 802.1x: OIT hasn't documented this yet, and we haven't fiddled with it extensively.  We suspect it really does work,  but we haven't gotten a working connection yet (see Devicescape workaround below)

What DOES work:

• Notes client 7.0.3 installer.  But after you get the client installed it might flake out after being launched a few times.  The only fix we've seen is to reinstall the client from scratch.
• Citrix client
• Parallels Workstation 3
• Microsoft Office 2004 for MacOS (only tried with all the latest patches)
• iLife '08 and iWork '08
• Printing via TCP/IP
• Connecting to Novel for file access using SFTP. Cyberduck is an excellent, free SFTP client for Mac.
• WiFi access on umd/umdfast networks using Web authentication
• Devicescape for automatic configuration of umd and umd-fast WiFi networks (the convenience of umd-secure* but without the security... this is a really nifty tool which also works on the iPhone!)