I’ve been running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server for just over a week now and I have definitely found a few items that are not functioning properly. Some of these may affect Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Client as well. Additionally, I have some hints and notes for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server users.
With any software upgrade, there are definitely some applications that will break. Most developers will be able to fix the bugs quickly and release new versions just after, or in some cases before, the release of a new operating system. I’ll list some of the problematic applications and their fixes, if available.
- Growl. Growl is probably the thing I’m missing the most right now. I use it for GrowlTunes and GrowlMail mostly. There is a beta version available, however it is doesn’t work quite right 100% of the time. You can give the beta a try here. Growl is currently at 1.2 Beta 2.
- Server Admin for any server below 10.5.8. If you try and connect to a Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Server running anything below 10.5.8 you will get an error that says it has to be 10.5.8 or higher. The screenshot below shows the exact error message.
- The third item I’ve run across is that 10.6 Snow Leopard doesn’t seem to notice Windows-based clients or at least doesn’t put them in the left sidebar of the Finder windows. I know 10.5 Leopard Server does this right out of the box since I have that installed in a VM.
- When I reset my Snow Leopard Server install, which loads much faster than Leopard, the brightness is completely back to full blast, despite having been all the way down just prior to reboot. Yes, this is a bug and not the end of the world, just seems like something that would be easy to fix and would have been tested. I guess I must be the odd person out, I’ve heard from more than one person that they run their monitors at full brightness.
Overall, despite the bugs that are present, Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server is well worth the $499 cost for unlimited clients. It is particularly worthwhile if you have a bunch of Mac OS X clients and want a central way to manage them. There have been some rumblings in the Mac community that the $30 client upgrade is hardly worthwhile and does not do anything. This is definitely not the case with 10.6 Snow Leopard Server. The overall improvements more than justify the cost.
