Installing OS X 10.5.3

I installed the OS X 10.5.3 update over the weekend. This was a bit of a hassle. Most of it was my fault, as I only had about a gig of free space on my laptop's hard disk. Not cool! I had purchased an external disk, so I had someplace to move things, but still I had to do it.

The other problem wasn't my fault. When I would ask the Updater to install the update, it would give me a permissions error. That was rather annoying as I'd just given it the admin password. Some searching revealed that this was not an uncommon error but there was no consensus on how to deal with it.

Not surprisingly, that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. The best advice I found was to repair permissions. This is a good idea in general and falls in the 'can't hurt' category. But when I tried, the progress bar would move about 15% and then stall. Hmm. This led me to try 'repair disk', but that had the same effect. Some more searching turned up some hints, most notably the suggestion to disconnect any external drives. After all that, I was able to finally go through the repair disk/repair permissions tasks.

Of course that didn't solve the installer problem.

So I went to the backup plan, downloading and installing the update manually. That worked fine, though I'm never comfortable when something just doesn't work, particularly if it's that simple. Anyway, 10.5.3 is now running on my Macbook Pro.

As for the update itself? It's fine. Most of 10.5.3 dealt with fixes, probably for issues I wasn't seeing. At any rate, I wasn't having many problems before, and I'm not now. I will still occasionally see graphic spikes in World of Warcraft but that's been a long-standing issue. I am interested to try out the added calendar sync between iCal and Google Calendar, which would be quite useful. But all in all, there's not much to see there, and installing the update is more a matter of good hygiene.

Rumors are building that next week's WWDC keynote will include an announcement of 10.6, with the actual release coming as soon as next January. It should be an interesting announcement; 10.5 is still being digested by consumers, and the current rumors seem to say that there won't be much new functionality. That would put Apple in a bit of a tough marketing spot, and I'm curious to see if that's really how it will play or if there's more there than anyone's letting on.