Hi Norm:
Hope so, Steve just put it on the truck.
Excellent!! You are not allowed to gloat in here for longer than a month
Now when you say "documents" with a lower case "d" do you mean my User
folder or do you mean the Documents folder (~/Documents)?
Inside your user folder, there is a folder named documents. I mean the
contents of that.
If so, the Documents folder does not contain all of my "stuff."
Pictures, Movies, Music, Sites, they should come across. Just copy them:
OS 10.6 has folders predefined for them.
I would use this as an opportunity to weed the Downloads folder: if it's not
a Universal Binary I think I would leave it where it is.
However, I'm getting in essence (with some nit differences) two
approaches: one, which parallels yours, and then another camp that says
Migration Assistant will do it all but you will need to install either
current or new versions of many applications.
I can only relate my personal experience, and that of posters in here who
have had problems of an insoluble nature.
I think migrating PPC to Intel is dangerous, and I wouldn't do it. If the
code survives, it cannot run in OS 10.6 (it will run in Rosetta, but you
would prefer to have a native version if you can). But if the preferences
come over, they may prevent the Universal version of the App from creating
clean preferences. So it may crash and hang and freeze until you track down
all those old preferences and nuke them.
I thought between preferences and the Library folder (especially
~/Library/Application Support but also ~/Library/Mail and others) that
there are many settings I've made that would take a long time to enter.
I think there are not "a lot". Whatever is there does not apply to the new
system, and is likely to make it sick.
I "need" AFAIK a good portion of all the other folders in ~/.
Desktop, Downloads, Library (hmmmm.... not sure if I want all but
certainly some), Movies, Music, Pictures, Public and Sites.
Desktop: You will find OS 10.6 easier to drive if you try not to have much
stuff on the desktop.
There are nine items on my desktop. Two of them are there because I forgot
to delete them. The other seven are automatically created by applications
such as the Finder that insist on sticking aliases on the desktop. I do not
"use" any of them: there's better ways to get at stuff in 10.6
Downloads: If it's not Universal, it can't run anyway so why keep it? If
you have already applied it or installed it, why keep it? You can always go
and get an up-to-date copy when you do need it. I know, I know... My
Downloads folder is like a cemetery for "seemed like a good idea at the
time" and "Don't throw anything away until you have made three copies"...
Library: If you use Apple Mail, you should get advice on how to bring that
across. I suggest the best way would be to set up the accounts manually and
"Import" the mailbox.
I don't use Mail, I use Entourage, and I have everything on the IMAP server
in New York City. I am in Sydney. I enter the user ID and password, and
that's it: there's no email data on the local machine(s), of which I have
several, both PC and Mac
Fonts: This is a bit of a "project". Old Macs and their users had hollow
logs full of fonts all over the system. This can lead to problems and
confusion and irritation in OS 10.6.
Whatever you do (and there's a bit of a "War and Peace" following below...)
DO NOT FORGET to use FontBook to RESOLVE the duplicates after you have
finished. If you don't, you WILL live in Crash City with Office 2008.
What I do, and what I recommend, is to have one single Fonts folder. And if
you are going to have only one, I suggest that it should be the "System"
font folder that is accessible to all users.
So I would move all fonts to /Library/Fonts (that's the root Library folder,
not the User library folder). Personally, I find that arrangement much
quicker and easier to manage.
I don't live in a world where I want different fonts available at different
times. OS 10.6 has extraordinarily high limits, and I take advantage of
them. I install all my fonts in a single folder, and leave them all
permanently loaded. Because I know that Microsoft Office is not the only
application set that will give you grief if a font manager starts enabling
or disabling fonts while you work.
But then, I have only 120 fonts. And I never need to find any of them,
because I have all the ones I want to use defined into Styles. When I hit
the style, I get the font, without having to think about it. Some of those
font choices were made in 1986 when I defined the styles. And some of them
look damned ugly these days! I will fix them when I next use the style
OS 10.6 will easily cope with more than 2,000 fonts. I have no idea how
high the limit actually is. Remember that each font costs you a little bit
of RAM. Unless you are Mr Moneybags with a terrabyte of RAM, I would
install only the fonts that arrive with the system, or applications that you
install, plus any others that you reasonably expect to use at least once in
the next ten years
Whether you decide to have one font folder or many, the critical thing is to
first install the OS, then Microsoft Office, and then resolve the
duplicates. Well, Steve has done the OS part: the guy's a bit of a
perfectionist, so we can probably rely on him to do a good job.
If you install Office 2008 from the CD, it will put the extra fonts it
offers in the correct place: you won't need to think about that. (It will
drop them into a "Microsoft" subfolder of the System font folder.)
Then you can start to bring across any fonts you want that you do not
already have (this is the first time that having only one font folder pays
big dividends: you can see at a glance whether you've got it or not).
Take reasonable care not to copy an older font over a newer font. If you
do, you will get some very peculiar glitches that may be difficult to
diagnose. Mac OS 10.6 and Microsoft Office both expect Unicode versions of
their fonts. And because they know that a modern Unicode font can contain
up to 64,000 characters, they expect a much wider range of characters in
each font than was the case in the older OSes.
Most of the workaday fonts in Unicode have about 1,500 characters in them.
Many of the older fonts had only 256. You will spend a lot of time getting
rid of square hollow boxes in your documents, if you overwrite the new fonts
with older versions that have a reduced character set.
Hope it has my Palatino.
It doesn't. It has Apple's latest version of Palatino, created by Type
Solutions Inc in 2006.
Have I not had words with you before about your Palatino fetish
Check
out Cambria on the new display you are about to get. On the modern
displays, you may find you come to prefer it. It was built in the knowledge
that fonts appear on "screen" rather than being "printed" much more often
these days. So while it's a nice piece of typography on the printed page,
it's a hell of a lot easier on the eyes if you have to look at it all day on
a computer screen
Now: I would seriously suggest that you should not transport ANYTHING else
across from the old machine, because I think it will cause problems on the
new machine. Problems ranging from random crashes and hangs to freezes and
slowdowns and "doesn't work right".
Of course, you may think of a few things I have forgotten.
Of course, you may wish to give the Migration Assistant a try. I did
I can only recount that MY experience with it was totally ugly, and I ended
up having to nuke the disk and start again.
Maybe they have fixed it with OS 10.6.2. Or: I should point out that I was
going between two very different classes of Mac. I was attempting to
migrate from a single-disk MacBook to a dual-volume Mac Pro with a RAID
array as one of the volumes. Maybe that was asking too much of the
Migration Assistant? But the result was truly unworkable. Twice, it
refused to even boot and I had to power-cycle it.
So I do not advise the use of the Migration Assistant
But if you want to try it, there's nothing stopping you. If you don't get a
good result, stick the DVD in the hole, nuke the drive, and start again
Like I did
Cheers
--
This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!
John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:
[email protected]