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Barbara has been mauled by a Tiger. She didn’t come off very well.

Finally, today, after months of speculation and waiting, Apple released Tiger, so I wandered down to the Store with Keith to see what happened at six when it was set for launch. As we suspected, they’d closed it up, but what we hadn’t expected was the queue of people that went - quite literally - right around the block. There was easily 1000 people there. And perhaps half that many again. We walked slowly along the line, not seeing anyone we knew, and worrying that there might not actually be any separate press arrangements.

Fortunately, as we completed our lap of the block we spotted the backs of some familiar heads, and hunched up with the other hacks, standing outside a separate door from the public.

As usual, all the Apple staff lined themselves up on the big glass staircase and clapped and cheered the new product before the doors were finally opened to much whooping and a surge of eager punters gushing in through the door to be the first to pick up their copies from where they were set out at the front. Whether the people at the very back of the queue went home empty handed or not, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

We were scooted up to the classroom at the back to get our copies, past the TV people who were filming the madness below them, then wandered around the block once more to watch the depleting queue before heading home to install.

As I say, Barbara didn’t come off all that well.

First, it simply wouldn’t load. It said there were ‘errors’. Nothing more specific than that. So, I repaired my permissions and did the obligatory /sbin/fsck -fy and then tried again. Mysteriously, though, after that the free space on my hard drive had jumped from 13GB to 24GB, meaning that only 3GB was being used.

Now I’ve not actually counted it myself, but I’m sure you can’t store a whole operating system, plus Microsoft Office, plus Photoshop, plus iLife, plus iWork, plus Macromedia Studio MX and all the other bits and bobs you use every day in just 3GB of space. That perhaps explains why, when trying to log in to see what had gone wrong, I just got a kernel panic every time I got to the login screen.

Poo.

Fortunately I don’t actually keep any files on there - they are all stored on my server - so all I had lost was a little bit of email, but it was very annoying. After half an evening of repairing and fixing and tweaking, it seemed she was beyond repair, so I took the drastic step of a fresh erase and install, and all went well.

So, now I have a nice speedy laptop once more. Without all those surplus, messy files to slow her down Barbara positively flies, and she looks so smart in her nice new OS.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 29th, 2005 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.