Switching to Panther

I did it. I switched to Panther, Apple’s MacOS X.3. I went to the shop two days ago, got my personal installation and went right ahead with the “easy” installation. The entire process went along just fine and then I rebooted and was a happy camper until I tried to log in. It just crashed, inluding the finder and all that was possible was turning the laptop off.

The problem was a virtual desktop application that was being loaded at startup and it just crashed everything. This should not happen. Period, no discussions. The application can crash but not the entire OS. I then logged in with the shift key pressed, something that results in all your personal extensions not being loaded. I then removed the application and am now happily using Expose to get arround my applications. I love it. Really.

I also really like the option to put labels to files. Especially on the desktop it makes finding things a lot easier. And I am starting to change my working behaviour though due to Expose. The desktop really becomes the desktop. You put the things on there that you are working on there now, at this moment. The applications quickly move out of the way with a press of F11 or a simple move to the bottom right screen corner.

I had another problem with the FileVault though which resulted in me changing arround the entire system of how I set up the laptop. For one, I moved all Pictures and MP3s to the Shared folder under Users. My home directory holds more or less the documents I am currently using, things I really work on, all my indexed mail from Zoe and a few other things. I still don’t have the FileVault turned on though, and I suggest you don’t either. FileVault encrypted my entire homedirectory, restarted and I then was happily sitting looking at a full clean homedirectory, all my stuff being gone. Well it actually wasn’t gone, but the preferences said that the FileVault is still turned off and I presume this resulted in the OS not decrypting my home directory on the fly. Thankfully you can open the encrypted file that is sitting in your home directory and I managed to get almost all my stuff back. Some preferences cannot be overwritten but that’s ok. Things are back working again, even though with some pain.

The next problem I currently have is that I can’t setup new users and I am not sure if that is a general problem with my installation or a problem with Panther. I still have to dig closer into this though. With fast user switching I’d actually like to set up a few more users for special tasks, especially in relation to encrypted home folders.

After the system is fully working now I have to say that while the move itself was a bit painful, the place I am at now, with a fully running Panther, is very nice. I like the improvements and I think it was money well spent. I am becomeing more productive and like my system a bit better again. Apple is on the right way with this thing.