DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

My Powerbook came with both OS 9.2 and 10.1 installed. I used 9.2 only long enough to reset the default OS preference… and I liked OS X immediately. Within a few hours’ work I had a complete web-development environment running on it: apache, php, mysql, and BBEdit. I was beyond pleased: I was smug.

Apple announced the new version of OS X with much fanfare. Reviews have been positive. And I was itching to reformat my disk to take OS 9.2 off, to satisfy an admittedly irrational urge to purify my system, and recover a few MB of space on the disk, as if I’d ever actually collect 30 GB worth of data useful enough to save.

So I wiped the disk, installed 10.2, and have been struggling ever since. The system feels a lot slower. Critical apps have not been ported. It’s weird, and unfortunate, and I’m not very happy.

Part of the problem is my fault… defaulting to familiar command-line tools, I made a backup of some preference files with the UNIX tar utility, which I’ve since learned is inadequate because (in its default mode) it does not copy resource forks. As a result, my backed-up preferences were useless and I had to re-configure several complicated apps, at a cost of two evenings’ time.

Fortunately I don’t rely on this machine for day-to-day work… mostly I just write journal entries on it, and you know how rarely that happens.