Some Sage Advice

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Just when I was starting to like Leopard, it went ahead and crushed me. It left me standing at the prom all alone with that sinking feeling. Here’s the latest with my little Leopard…

Of course I updated to 10.5.1 as soon as it was released by Apple since I knew it fixed a boatload of problems. However, as with many system updates, they can break as many things as they fix. First of, Time Machine, the really cool automated backup and recovery part of Leopard has never worked for me. And with the 10.5.1 update, it still doesn’t work. I have another large firewire drive I am going to build this weekend so perhaps that will solve the problem. I also changed my file sharing name from “Dean Novosat’s Mac” to “Dean Novosat Mac” because I read that if your sharing names contains characters other than 0-9 and A-Z it would cause Time Machine to fail. Great feature since by default, Apple’s own installer names your machine with an apostrophe “s” on it.

Then today I had a major malfunction. I use Retrospect to backup my local hard drive and 4 shared volumes of a Windows 2000 server. Some of the shares are SMB and some are AFP. I backup about 160GB of data to an internal SATA 500GB drive. This has performed flawlessly under Tiger since I installed it long ago. Retrospect kicks off automatically at 4:30 am, does its backup thing, then is quietly goes back to bed keeping me feel safe and secure. Well, the first week of Leopard, Retrospect never woke up to do a backup. So today, I manually started it. It backed up great for about 5 hours. Then, for no reason whatsoever, I started getting the error “Server Disconnected” and I lost all network connectivity. I couldn’t get email, get on the internet, or access any of my shared volumes.

So, a simple restart should clear this problem…or so I thought! Not only did something (Retrospect, file sharing, ??) kill my backup in mid-stream, but it locked up OTHER applications as well. This is NEVER supposed to happen in OS X. Obviously, someone isn’t playing nice on the Leopard playground! I had to force quit several applications and then the Mac would restart. Only…it started to shutdown and it hung on the dreaded blue screen! I thought the blue screen of death (BSOD) was a Windows phenomenon not a Mac thing! So, I had to hard power off the Mac by holding the power button in for 10 seconds.

After a nice long reboot, I have Retrospect running again. Only time will tell if it fails this time or if it succeeds. I’ll check back in about 5 hours.

So here is what I found as a workaround to print directly onto a CD from EPSON PrintCD software when you get the error, “The EPSON printer driver dealing with CD printing is not installed.”

When you chose “Print” out of Epson Print CD and you are printing to a disk in the cd disk tray of the Epson Stylus Photo R220 (or R320 and other “R” series printers), when you get the error message saying “Print driver is not installed,” just hit OK.

Then in the next window (which is where you usually have control of the CD tray) click on “Manual Print” in the upper right corner.

Next, click OK on the next window.

When the next window opens, pull the pull down menu down where it says “Copies & Pages” and change it to “Print Settings”.

Change the “Media Type” to CD/DVD.

Then click print.

You’ve now taken a simple 2-click process and created a 16-step workflow…but at least you should be able to print on CDs and DVDs once again.

OK, so it isn’t life shattering, but one thing that is really bothering me about Leopard is my Epson R220 printer no longer prints CDs. I bought this printer so I could print directly on printable CDs and DVDs. Believe me, people really appreciate a custom CD or DVD movie with nice graphics printed right on the disc. The Epson R220 has performed flawlessly up until Leopard. Even under Tiger 10.4.8 it printed without a hitch (I mention this since I have found while researching the problem that some people have had this problem since Tiger 10.4.).

The printer is seen by Leopard and it prints normal prints from within applications. It only fails when I try to print from the Epson PrintCD program. I get the following message:

“The EPSON printer driver dealing with CD printing is not installed.”

I have reinstalled the EPSON Print CD software and drivers but still get he same message. I uninstalled the printer driver and reinstalled it, then reinstalled the Epson PrintCD software. Again, no success. Searching the error in Google yields 45,000 results so evidently this is a problem.

I have yet to find a solution. I hope to be able to spend some time over the upcoming holiday to find a fix. Several people posting to forums have suggested switching to a program called DiscLabel which I downloaded the demo and it is very nice. However, the Epson software was free and it was fast and simple.

I will keep you posted!

So, now that I have my shiny, new Mac OS X Leopard system, I can report on what is and what ISN’T working. First of all, let me say that I will not report on the new features and look of Leopard. There are hundred of people doing that on their websites. What I will report on is how Leopard impacts how I work and what I do everyday.

So, first things first. Safari and Firefox both work fine and Safari feels quite a bit snappier in Leopard than in Tiger. I did some quick testing with Adobe CS2 and here is what is working fine: in Photoshop, I scanned come images with my Epson Perfections 2450 scanner via firewire. I did some simple retouching to the image with Photoshop CS2 with no problems. I also created some graphics with Illustrator CS2 with no apparent problems. I didn’t push anything by using any strange filters or obscure functions. I then took these elements and used them in InDesign CS2. Again, all went without a hitch.

I had to pay some bills (and amazingly I still get bills even though I use Leopard so it isn’t that life-changing!) so I fired up Quicken. I still use Quicken 2003 only because it does what I need to do and I saw no need to upgrade. I only use it to balance my checkbooks and I don’t use it for any online transactions. Again, Quicken worked fine. I even reconciled my bank statement manually with no problems.

Next up, I tried to sync my Sony Vaio (a Palm OS device) with my Now Up-to-Date. This is always a tricky scenario and is my most constant source of problems on the Mac. It seems that any changes that I make to my Mac causes this combination to have problems. And my Leopard install was no different! I put my Vaio in its USB cable and pressed the sync button. The syncing software went to work (amazingly as this is where it usually fails!). About 30 seconds later, the sync was finished. I looked at my calendar to see how it went. It had not gone well! The sync had duplicated EVERY event in my calendar from the beginning of time until the end! And there is no easy way in Now Up-to-Date nor in the Palm OS to delete duplicated events. So I spent the better part of the next hour deleting all the duplicate events!

And it gets worse. Next I tried to test my backup software. I use Retrospect and am VERY disciplined about my backups. I backup all my files to external firewire drives everyday. I also backup some network shares that sit on a Windows 2000 server and the volumes are mounted using either SMB or Appletalk. Leopard handles network shares quite differently and the volumes are not mounted on the desktop like they were in Panther or Tiger. Now the shares are in the sidebar as a “sub-item” of the server that sits in the sidebar. It is harder to explain than it is to see it in action. Well, because of the way the shared volumes are handled, Retrospect can’t see the shared volumes. So they can’t be backed up! Also, my backup is scheduled to kick off at 4 am. Since Leopard, it hasn’t kicked off as scheduled yet. I am investigating a workaround to this.

In my next report, I will outline some printing problems I have been having with my Epson printer.