Panther Installation

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

Panther came yesterday, so I backed up the data in my home dir on my laptop and installed it. The whole process took just over an hour and went without a hitch.

When reading the following, please keep in mind that the installation is being performed on an 800mhz Powerbook with a 1mb L3 cache and 512mb of RAM. Here's the breakdown:

Minutes/Action

• 1-15: 12+ gigs of home dir being backed up to firewire drive
• 16-33: Reboot, begin installation - skipping disc verification, I choose to erase and install from scratch.
• 33: Disc 1 prompts a reboot, finishes installing and asks for disc 2
• 33-48: Disc 2 goes through its installation process and finishes successfully
• 48-53: User interaction begins. I'm prompted to create a user, fill out product registration information, set up a network connection, and enter Mail configuration.
• 53: Finder launches for the first time and software update immediately launches itself.
• 53-58: Software update installs new iPod software, iSync 1.3, iTunes 4.1, and Security Update 2003-10-28 (which requires a restart). While this process is running, I begin to clean up my dock.
• 60-66: Disc 3 installation begins. I have chosen to install X11 and the additional fonts (as I can barely read some Arabic) - but not the additional drivers for ancient printers. While this process is running, I begin to explore the System Preferences and start personalizing my OS X experience.
• 66-79: I begin the XCode disc installation with the default settings. I continue to tinker with my System Prefs. Oddly enough, when I try to turn on FileVault it prompts me to log out and log back in - but the Installer cancels the logout request automatically and prompts me to tell me I'm an idiot. I shrug and let it finish.
• 80: Fully up-to-date, usable, Panther installation on my laptop. Hooray!

So there you have it. It takes an hour and twenty minutes to get Panther installed from scratch. Figure another half-hour or so of meticulously going through my backed up ~/Library to selectively restore preferences for applications like Safari, iCal, iChat, NetNewsWire and my Keychain... but while I'm doing that I can be installing Panther on my iMac.