Leopard upgrade woes

Okay, I finally decided to upgrade to Leopard and also picked up a Time Capsule so I could have a more stable and faster router for internet access. It also has the added bonus of allowing me wireless printing, a file server, and hopefully automatic backups. All this sounds great but there have been a few bumps on the way.

First of all I neglected to backup my bookmarks. I only have myself to blame on this one so I am not too upset, after all I do know better, I just got lazy there. I will be more careful to make sure I do occasional bookmark backups in future. Perhaps I should have done some weeding there anyway? I get to start over

Next, my beloved GIMP didn't work anymore. I was devastated over that. Tonight I finally found out how to get GIMP going again though. I hadn't put Inkscape back on either and in going for that, I found a tip to upgrade my X11 to XQuartz. I picked up XQuartz version 2.2.3 and happily GIMP is back in service! I do recommend also tweaking a bit here by opening a Terminal window and typing:
mkdir ~/. fontconfig

followed by an Enter. This will fix a bug in Inkscape that prevents it from loading at all and also allows you to run X11 without having the annoying XTerm window opening all the time. Finding this pair of fixes made my life much happier. Now you may say that I could have avoided all this frustration by just buying Adobe Creative Suite but hey, by tracking fixes I got software that does the same thing for no cost at all. Yes, it was a bit frustrating but I did prevail. I have Leopard and my favorite apps.

My final frustration is that I still don't have Time Machine working. I do have the Time Capsule up and I am able to network through it quite easily. I can move files to it and even wirelessly print through it. My only problem is that I can't seem to use Time Machine. I have since upgraded to the latest version of Leopard, the disc is 10.5.3 and 10.5.4 is out now. The other possible issue is that when I loaded Time Machine the first time it told me I should do a firmware update. After I did that I found several dozen posts on the Apple Discussion Forums complaining about Time Machine no longer working after the firmware update so I'm thinking that might be the issue. I haven't figured out how to undo the update yet, nor have I found a new update to fix the issue. So not all is well yet but I am feeling better about it all. I suspect it's just a matter of time before I get it all going flawlessly.

I will say that many people posting on the forums complain a lot and even sound ready to return the hardware or software since it didn't work they way they thought it should. I'm not one to do that, though I did have to return the first disc of Leopard, as it had a flaw in the disc that prevented my computer from reading it at all. That was a genuine flaw that no amount of care could fix. The second worked great.


Credits for all this go to:
www.inkscape.org for the suggestion
Macosforge.org for xquartz
and for the Inkscape tweak:
http://bloggy.kuneri.net/2008/05/14/how-to-run-inkscape-on-mac-leopard
I had forgotten that, though I did it way back when I was using Open Office before I found NeoOffice.

I appreciate the other people's work and posting but wanted a place where all this was together so I can do my daughter's upgrade soon. We got a Family pack and she also uses these apps.