I upgraded my 10.5.8 Leopard system to 10.6 Snow Leopard tonight and all said and done it went well. I did a 64-bit kernel install(forced using the 6 and 4 keys during install startup) on my MacBook3,1. The installation had no issues whatsoever and cleanly installed. It took about 45 minutes from the time I booted from the Snow Leopard disk to the time I got to my desktop again. I can say I honestly do not see the huge speed improvements that have been talked about so much. This may be different had I done a clean install, i’m sure. The biggest improvement for me was the integrated Exchange 2007 support. I can finally say goodbye to that piece of garbage Microsoft calls “Entourage” and use Apple Mail and iCal. Here are some of the issues I have run into so far.

Setup Assistant
I did an upgrade from 10.5.8 and it went exactly as planned until reboot when I received a mysterious prompt. I was asked “Where is System Events” and given a dialog to locate it. I pointed it to the location of “System Events.app” which strangely is the same location it’s always been, in /System/Library/CoreServices/System Events.app. The dialog went away and I was not prompted again on future reboots.

8/27/09 7:28:49 PM Setup Assistant[221] Unknown class MBSPAMPopUpButtonCell in Interface Builder file at path /System/Library/CoreServices/Setup Assistant.app/Contents/Resources/RegSection.bundle/
Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Reg_SPAM.nib.

System Preferences
The following preference panes no longer load – not a big loss as they were not supposed to be in Leopard either:

8/27/09 8:31:11 PM System Preferences[304] Preference bundle “/Users/EDITED/Library/PreferencePanes/Archives.prefPane” is misplaced, ignoring…
8/27/09 8:31:11 PM System Preferences[304] Preference bundle “/Users/EDITED/Library/PreferencePanes/Processor.prefPane” is misplaced, ignoring…

While in the Spotlight pane System Preferences crashed all together and wrote a bug report:

Process: System Preferences [630]
Path: /Applications/System Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/System Preferences
Identifier: com.apple.systempreferences
Version: 7.0 (7.0)
Build Info: SystemPrefsApp-1750000~1
Code Type: X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [174]
Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0×0000000000000000, 0×0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
Full Report – System Preferences_2009-08-27-224745_macbook

The following was written to console:

8/27/09 10:47:39 PM [0x0-0x65065].com.apple.systempreferences[630] System Preferences(630,0x7fff70d57be0) malloc: *** error for object 0x1001d5620: pointer being freed was not allocated
8/27/09 10:47:39 PM [0x0-0x65065].com.apple.systempreferences[630] *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
8/27/09 10:47:44 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[174] ([0x0-0x65065].com.apple.systempreferences[630]) Job appears to have crashed: Abort trap

Kernel Errors
I have received some rather interesting random kernel messages:

8/27/09 7:23:26 PM kernel IG: Invalid firmware max backlight setting
8/27/09 7:26:57 PM /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/
ATS.framework/Support/fontd[223]
Re-generating ATS user database. Either one of your font files is problematic or a font file is sitting on a very slow network.

mdworker
While I notice no strange behavior here I do get the following:

8/27/09 7:45:59 PM mdworker32[185] Error loading /Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/
SourceCode.mdimporter/Contents/MacOS/SourceCode: dlopen(/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/
SourceCode.mdimporter/Contents/MacOS/SourceCode, 262): Symbol not found: _auto_zone_set_layout_type Referenced from: /Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/
SourceCode.mdimporter/Contents/
MacOS/../../../../../../../../Library/PrivateFrameworks//
DevToolsCore.framework/Versions A/DevToolsCore
Expected in: /usr/lib/libauto.dylib
8/27/09 7:45:59 PM mdworker32[185] Cannot find function pointer MetadataImporterPluginFactory for factory
548A3091-3C5D-498A-A329-B532A6C896BB in CFBundle/CFPlugIn 0x332b00 </Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/
Library/Spotlight/SourceCode.mdimporter> (bundle, not loaded)
8/27/09 7:45:59 PM mdworker32[185] Error loading /Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/
SourceCode.mdimporter/Contents/MacOS/SourceCode: dlopen(/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Library/
Spotlight/SourceCode.mdimporter/Contents/MacOS/SourceCode, 262): Symbol not found: _auto_zone_set_layout_type
Referenced from: /Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Library/
Spotlight/SourceCode.mdimporter/Contents/MacOS/../../../../../../../../
Library/PrivateFrameworks//DevToolsCore.framework/Versions A/DevToolsCore Expected in: /usr/lib/libauto.dylib
8/27/09 7:45:59 PM mdworker32[185] Cannot find function pointer MetadataImporterPluginFactory for factory
548A3091-3C5D-498A-A329-B532A6C896BB in CFBundle/CFPlugIn 0x332b00 </Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/
Contents/Library/Spotlight/SourceCode.mdimporter> (bundle, not loaded)

3rd Party App: NetNewsWire
While launching for the first time after the upgrade things were fine up until subscriptions attempted to refresh. However, does appear to run fine now. NetNewsWire spit the following to the console:

8/27/09 9:45:50 PM NetNewsWire[433] -[_NSThreadPerformInfo count]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x17dc4a10
8/27/09 9:45:50 PM NetNewsWire[433] An uncaught exception was raised
8/27/09 9:45:50 PM NetNewsWire[433] -[_NSThreadPerformInfo count]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x17dc4a10

And then crashed:

Process: NetNewsWire [433]
Path: /Applications/NetNewsWire.app/Contents/MacOS/NetNewsWire
Identifier: com.ranchero.NetNewsWire
Version: 3.2b23 (3228)
Code Type: X86 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [174]
Exception Type: EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP)
Exception Codes: 0×0000000000000002, 0×0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 7
Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception ‘NSInvalidArgumentException’, reason: ‘-[_NSThreadPerformInfo count]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x17dc4a10’
*** Call stack at first throw:

Thread 7 crashed with X86 Thread State (32-bit):
eax: 0×00000000 ebx: 0x96186f25 ecx: 0xb0207000 edx: 0x0000003b
edi: 0xa0831ab0 esi: 0x1833ad60 ebp: 0xb0206b98 esp: 0xb0206b80
ss: 0x0000001f efl: 0×00000282 eip: 0x98aa1b07 cs: 0×00000017
ds: 0x0000001f es: 0x0000001f fs: 0x0000001f gs: 0×00000037
cr2: 0x0202a000
Full Report – NetNewsWire_2009-08-27-214557_macbook.crash

3rd Party App: Little Snitch
Appears to not be in any way compatible with 10.6 as this time. The daemon was in a startup loop. Only resolution was to uninstall it for now.

8/27/09 7:24:47 PM com.apple.launchd[1] (at.obdev.littlesnitchd[255]) Exited with exit code:
8/27/09 7:24:47 PM com.apple.launchd[1] (at.obdev.littlesnitchd) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

3rd Party App: iStat Menus
Did not load after the upgrade. Apparently did not like the 64-bit?

8/27/09 7:25:16 PM SystemUIServer[232] Error loading /Users/EDITED/Library/Application Support/iStat menus/Extras/MenuCracker.menu/Contents/MacOS/MenuCracker: dlopen(/Users/EDITED/Library/Application Support/iStat menus/Extras/MenuCracker.menu/Contents/MacOS/MenuCracker, 265): no suitable image found. Did find: /Users/EDITED/Library/Application Support/iStat menus/Extras/MenuCracker.menu/Contents/MacOS/MenuCracker: no matching architecture in universal wrapper
8/27/09 7:25:16 PM SystemUIServer[232] failed to instantiate and get the principal class of bundle: NSBundle </Users/EDITED/Library/Application Support/iStat menus/Extras/MenuCracker.menu> (not yet loaded)

3rd Party App: Caffeine
It appears to work fine however I do get the following messages:

8/27/09 7:34:14 PM Caffeine[259] Caffeine(259,0xa0139500) malloc: *** error for object 0x18d500: pointer being freed was not allocated
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
8/27/09 7:34:14 PM [0x0-0x14014].com.lightheadsw.Caffeine[259] Caffeine(259,0xa0139500) malloc: *** error for object 0x18d500: pointer being freed was not allocated

3rd Party App: Growl
Although it does appear to be running fine I do get warnings I don’t recall seeing before:

8/27/09 7:35:19 PM GrowlHelperApp[258] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x11fe20 of class NSCFString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking
8/27/09 7:41:16 PM GrowlHelperApp[258] *** attempt to pop an unknown autorelease pool (0×1001000)

3rd Party App: Parallels
With it’s deep kernel ties I expected parallels to have some issues. The older versions are actually removed by the snow leopard installer. I haven’t had time to deal with my version yet but I can tell from the looks of it – it looks heavily broken.