Welcome to Darwin!

Opening a new terminal window on Tiger displayed a message saying

Welcome to Darwin!

On Leopard this doesn’t happen. This is because the Message of the Day file is not automatically created under Leopard.

To have something displayed, simply put some text into /etc/motd. This will be displayed each time you start a terminal session.

Apache and PHP on Leopard

Out of the box, personal websites weren’t working. Mainly because Leopard ships with Apache2 compared to Tiger’s 1.3.

The following helped solve the problem for me.

  • Enable php5 by updating /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and uncomment the line
    LoadModule php5.module...
  • Turn on personal web sharing via System Preferences.
  • Users configuration is done in /etc/apache2/users. Ensure that you have a
    youruserid.conf
    file with appropriate directives. Mine contains
      <Directory "/Users/youruserid/Sites/">
          Options Indexes MultiViews
          AllowOverride All
          Order allow,deny
          Allow from all
      </Directory>
    
  • Logs are written to /var/log/apache2 rather than /var/log/httpd.

Leopard - First Impressions

Well first impressions. In a nutshell - unbelievably shite!

  • The default desktop has to go - far too distracting - too many bright white lights.
  • Then there is the transparency of the menu bar at the top of the screen. Blech.
  • When you alt-tab away from Safari, the chrome on Safari actually gets lighter. When you alt-tab back into it, it gets so dark that it is barely legible.
  • Stripes in Finder
  • No Java 6.
  • Firewall settings were rooted.
  • One good thing - when you use apple-shift-4 to indicate area of screen you want to copy, you get size indicators.

Maybe I have just been using Mac too long now and am getting set in my ways.

Anyway, it is too bleeding edge for me. I reverted back to Tiger from the full SuperDuper! clone I made just before I did the upgrade.