Making proper use of my status as a Univ. of Phoenix faculty member, I got a discounted (*) copy of MacOS X® 10.3 (Panther). I put in my pre-order a few weeks back and was (1) surprised when the "shipping" notice came last Thurs., and was (2) astonished when the package actually showed up on Friday.
I wish it known that I showed admirable, commendable, praise-worthy restraint and "paternal responsibility" in that Beth was down from college for the weekend and Spent Time With Us for a change and I didn't do more than open the box to look at the pamphlet-sized documentation while she was on hand.
It was trial and a tribulation and if Pope John-Paul II doesn't add me to the next round of Beatifications, than .. well, it's all just Politics is all I have to say. :-)
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest ..
Before trying the upgrade/install, I took at least a couple of the precautions that MacFixIt recommended: I ran DiskWarrior® to physically clean up my OS X partition, and used Disk Utility to "repair permissions". I also moved apps and utilities that I'd added out of Applications and Utilities into my home dir (I'm so glad that even "pseudo-MacOS" (always remember that when you talk about "Mac OS X" you're not talking about an operating system, but rather a GUI "Mac Emulation" layer on top of Unix. .. MacOS X is no more an OS than "KDE" or "GNOME" on top of Linux are.) still handles moved directories and files that way MacOS always have; that as long as they're being moved on the same volume, the "Finder" auto-adjusts things so that the move is transparent to the usage.
Anyway, I was now ready for the upgrade/install. I thought I had to boot from the CD but turns out you can put it in while logged in and just double-click the installer. It then restarts into the CD. It auto-selected "upgrade" which was fine, and then I customized the install, chucking the Asian-language support, adding X11 install, and a few other tweaks. Then let it go.
I got a minor scare when "Basic system upgrade" (Disk One) was finished and the system rebooted into Panther for the first time. Norton Personal Firewall® kvetched at me that something was non-kosher but I figured I'd find out what was wrong later. Didn't get the chance, actually, as the upgrade auto-continued. All the "optional software" went in, and then (I think?) there was a second restart. No warnings/messages from NPF so it may have been a spurious, while things-were-unstable situation.
On the other hand, when I log in, I get a message that Norton Privacy Control® is uncompatible with Panther and Live Update® hasn't yet found an update for it.
My last requirement was to upgrade the development tools. No problems there.
I did a "Repair Permissions" run with the newly installed Disk Utility just for general principles.
Everything seems to be nice and stable and content. I don't know what things didn't install because my hardware (300MHz iBook®, no Firewire, 1 USB port, no AV ports, etc.) doesn't require or support them. The major stuff seems to be there. Nothing seems broken that I can tell .. which in itself is amusing.
Actually, I should qualify that. Nothing Major seems broken.
That's all I have for the moment. I'm going to post this to my "pseudo blog" and will add to it as I play with Panther more.
I still hope that they name one of the next MacOS releases "Ocelittle" .. it would please Beth.
(* $60 instead of $130 .. not a discount to ignor)