A new UNcubed uploaded itself to the ether late last night. (Okay, I helped.)

Plus, Aarti was on yesterday’s Art & Story Extreme, with Jerzy Drozd. You don’t want to miss it!

-Krishna

Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest cat-themed OS, found its way to my house yesterday (making for a very well timed self-birthday gift). Now, there was no particular need for me to run Apple’s latest OS… but I wanted to, being an Apple geek and all.

I ordered the Snow Leopard family pack from Amazon, for $43 and change. While waiting for my copy to arrive, I spent a couple of hours over the weekend eagerly reading the reviews from people who’d already installed the OS on their machines.

Here are my experiences. Take from them what you will…

Mac Pro (8-core early 2008 model 2.8GHz of RAM with 6GB of RAM): Yesterday afternoon, I performed a clean install on an unused hard drive partition. Installation went incredibly smooth. I opted for a ‘Custom Install’, unchecking the ‘Additional Languages’ option. I used Apple’s own Migration Assistant to move my data over immediately after the install. This process took approximately 2 hours (I have lots of data), and I was finally presented with the Snow Leopard desktop.

I didn’t get a chance to play with Snow Leopard so much, but my initial observations are that it is FAST, and when I mean ‘it’, I’m referring to Finder response and application launch times. There’s a noticeable difference between Leopard and Snow Leopard – even shutdowns and restarts are much, much quicker in Snow Leopard.

All in all, very pleased with how smooth that particular install went.

Aarti’s Macbook Pro (CoreDuo 2.16GHz with 2GB of RAM): Aarti’s machine is a first generation Intel processor Macbook Pro. Installation started yesterday evening before we went out for a celebratory dinner.

When I came back, I discovered that the display on the laptop was dim – to the point where I could barely see the screen. Early this morning, I made back-ups of Aarti’s data and opted to do a clean install. Even with the clean install option, it was nearly impossible to see the display. I knew that the display was getting a proper video signal, because at the beginning of the boot sequence, I would see the gray screen and Apple logo.

Perplexed, I hooked up the Macbook Pro to an external display. No luck. While the external display looked fine, the display on the Macbook Pro screen was still dim.

Frustrated, I began a few Google searches.

It turned out that I was not alone.

The solution to the problem was decidedly low-tech: use a flashlight.

Excuse me? Use a flashlight??

Not having a flashlight, I had to squint really hard to barely make out the Snow Leopard install screen. Not being able to see the mouse pointer at first made this task incredibly irritating. Not even eye exercises could have helped. Finally, after I removed my glasses and squinted, I could barely make out the cursor. Seemingly, I made my way through the series of install options. And lo and behold, the machine finished the install and rebooted, with the display now crisp and vivid.

This had to be the worst Apple OS install process I’ve ever encountered. Aarti’s machine now zips along with a crisp display, but for a while, I was gnashing my teeth, ready to toss my Snow Leopard discs out the window.

I’m definitely going to wait before installing Snow Leopard on my laptop… I haven’t had a chance to put other aspects of Snow Leopard through its paces, but I plan to soon, once I’ve reinstalled my main production apps (Painter, Photoshop, etc.)

So, that’s my first impressions of Snow Leopard so far… how did your install of Snow Leopard go?

-Krishna

I took a few photos of the ‘unboxing’ process while opening another fresh stack of Rebootus Maximus books. The printer did an excellent job packing the books in.

I’m working at a feverish pace trying to process orders as fast as I can. Here’s part of the fourth stack I’m preparing to mail out tomorrow, before the Labor Day weekend holidays. Again, thank you for your patience! (Oh, and if you want, you can order your copy now – only $20 + shipping!). Add 10 bucks for an Artist Edition, where I’ll draw and autograph your book!

As always, thank you for your support!

-Krishna

Got a caption for this pic? Post yours in the comments below!

-Krishna

I discovered this one by accident…

I have commonly accessed folders in the Dock. One of those folders happens to be my “Fonts” folder. Using Stacks, I selected the Fonts folder, and saw detailed thumbnail views for all the fonts I have in my collection.

Stacks is imminently more useful in Snow Leopard. For one, you can navigate and tunnel through folders using Stacks – something that was not possible before in Leopard.

Another tip I’d like to share involves Expose. Drag the Expose application from Applications > Utiltiies onto your Dock. You have fast access to all your open and minimized windows (not only in the current window, but even other windows you’ve assigned to other Spaces). Incredibly useful.

The more I play with Snow Leopard, the more I like it.

-Krishna

P.S. Snow Leopard installed without incident on my early ‘08 Macbook Pro. I performed the upgrade on top of the existing install. So, two out of the three Macs we own handled the upgrade smoothly.

I would really love to attend the Florida Linux Show this October, in Orlando. Booth prices are pretty expensive for these types of conferences, so what I’d love to be able to do is partner up with a company that plans to exhibit.

If anyone out there has contacts with Linux companies like RedHat, Ubuntu, etc., could you drop me an e-mail as to who I should contact?

Thanks in advance!

-Krishna

P.S. I’m interested in attending any and all tech shows and conferences. As costs are prohibitive, I’m looking for corporate sponsorship for these events. Help me help your company!