We've now installed Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) on three computers. My two work computers (Powerbook and PowerMac G4 DP450) and our home iMac (1 GHz, flatscreen). The installs were straight upgrades instead of the more laborious archive and install or clean install. The upgrades of the Powerbook and iMac went without a hitch. The only customization was to make sure the older Epson print drivers that included the 740 were installed (not default), and to leave out all of the language translations (at least on my Powerbook). Both were installed with zero problems and all applications appear to work as advertised.
The only one I was concerned about was the PowerMac, and rightly so--this has been my work computer since it came with OS 9, and I've been upgrading it with new OS's and have never done a clean install of any of them. I've also installed a ton of 3rd party software (and deleted much of it too), Fink for Unix style programs, developers tools, preference panes, and so on. In other words, there's probably a lot of junk floating around on it, some of which may not work right under 10.3. So, to cover my bases, I did all the disk maintenance I could think of, including rebuilding the volume with DiskWarrrior, optimizing the drive with Tech Tools Pro 3.9, and repairing disk permissions. After unplugging the external Firewire drive and CD burner (as recommended), I started the installation. Again, loading the disks and clicking OK when prompted went without a hitch. The problems started on reboot after the final steps of installation. The login window displayed correctly, but then after logging in, there was a longer than usual pause while the Finder launched. Then when it did, the first app crashed almost immediately after opening followed by the Finder blinking on and off--using the force-quit command to relaunch the Finder had no effect, and the system looked dead in the water.
After searching around and trying basic stuff (like booting into single user mode and running fsck -f [-y didn't work because of "journaling"], or booting from the install CD and running disk utility to repair the drive and fix file permissions), I found similar instances on the Apple OS 10.3 support forum. It turns out that programs or pref panes that load on start up that are incompatible with the OS might do this. One specifically mentioned the Haxies, small programs that add functionality to the Finder. It turns out that way back before better font smoothing was added to the OS, I had installed such a Haxie (Silk) to turn on smoothing in MS Word. Luckily the System Preferences could still be launched from the Dock--after disabling this, the system rebooted normally, and all looks well.
Next time--more on the performance and enhancements found in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther.
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