Snow Leopard is here!

So I got snow leopard today and upgraded my computer. Actually, the whole install went very smoothly, which I think was one of the design goals. Mostly everything just worked. I installed the OS and xcode. Most things simply worked. I had had the foresight to upgrade the Cisco VPN to the latest version BEFORE I did this, since it usually breaks on an OS upgrade. The first real challenge came with the printer, an Epson 600 Workforce. It uses ppc code, and rosetta, the emulation layer, is no longer installed by default. So I had to install that, and then reinstall the printer driver, having updated it from Epson’s site. It now works perfectly. The next challenge came with the unix applications. I had to forcibly reinstall and rebuild everything in macports, but that went ok. Where I got in trouble is with Wine, which depends on a version of Freetype that’s being only built for 64 bits when it’s needed in 32bits. What’s going on of course is standard Unix dependency hell triggered by the migration of much of OS X to 64 bits in Snow Leopard. Well since others have already logged the bug with macports, I’m sure it will be gone in a few days.
So now that I did, do I like it ? Visually the most obvious change is conforming the default gamma setting to the same value as in Windows. The colors on my desktop are noticeably different. There’s lots of other little changes too. John Siracusa’s review on Ars Technica gives an in-depth look at what’s new. The new finder and dock/expose features are nice, it feelds speedier, and lots of other nice little things. It’s not a revolution, but a good incremental improvement. And at $29 the price was right.

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