Apple finally released OSX 10.5. (leopard I guess, but I don’t call OSX by its cat name ever because for some reason I can not remember what cat is what, I even bought the wrong one accidentally once, doh!) I went against my usual wait and see policy and installed it on the day it came out.

First off, I was going to head down to the apple store this past Friday and get in line at 6:00 to get a copy. This was until I noticed that no apple’s website their shipping was listed as “Delivers on 10/26/2007”. Well hell, if they are going to promise that it will deliver on a certain day rather than promise when it will ship, I might as well just order it online. I did expect apple to come through with their promise, what was a nice surprise though is that they shipped it via FedEx priority overnight. I had my copy of OSX in my hands by 10am, way earlier than if I had gone to the apple store, and for free no less. Thank you apple for this nice detail.

Of course, I got caught up in the installer trouble like so many other people. I had taken a nap while the installer ran, and woke up to the never ending blue screen. Normally I would have spent hours and hours doing a reinstall and trying to figure out what the problem was, but it was Friday night by this point so I went out drinking instead.

The next morning, low and behold, my issue was the first article on Slashdot. How handy, I wish I could just go to bed every night and have my latest problem solved for me.

It was a little frustrating that people, even the Slashdot article was calling this blue screen the Blue Screen of Death. The famous BSOD is a kernel panic which is something OSX is not immune to. This is what OSX’s equivalent of the BSOD looks like:

I have gotten four of these in the four days since installing 10.5. To be fair, on another computer I have been using Windows Vista Ultimate for over a month and have not been able to get it to crash. It slows down and complains a lot, but it hasn’t had a kernel panic.

I think that my panics I’ve been getting are probably related to some software I had installed before the upgrade. Just to be safe, I ordered a new hard drive from Other World Computing so I can swap it out and do a fresh install next week.

So, what’s the verdict. 10.5 has a lot of awesome new features and enhancements, but has a lot of issues as well. I’ll write up my wishlist for 10.5.1 later on.