# Going from Tiger to Snow Leopard



## satchmo

I realize it's not out yet...but what's the likelihood of being able to go directly from Tiger to Snow Leopard.

Or will I need to purchase Leopard first and then purchase Snow Leopard as well?
Would rather save $ and just get Snow.


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## kb244

satchmo said:


> I realize it's not out yet...but what's the likelihood of being able to go directly from Tiger to Snow Leopard.
> 
> Or will I need to purchase Leopard first and then purchase Snow Leopard as well?
> Would rather save $ and just get Snow.


Well Snow Leopard is going to be a brand new OS all in itself. It basically Leopard-Redone (polished, optimized, dropping support for some old frameworks such as carbon, etc). 

That being said keep in mind (I don't know what you use), Snow Leopard will only be available for the intel platform. So if you do have an intel platform you should be able to just go and buy a copy of Snow leopard, no need to get Leopard first (would be akin to saying, do I need to buy tiger first before I get leopard).

In short : snow leopard is the next OSX just like leopard to tiger, the only difference is the new 10.6 just happens to share a part of the name of its predecessor.


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## MacGenius24

satchmo said:


> I realize it's not out yet...but what's the likelihood of being able to go directly from Tiger to Snow Leopard.
> 
> Or will I need to purchase Leopard first and then purchase Snow Leopard as well?
> Would rather save $ and just get Snow.


You should have no problems going from tiger to snow leopard. Like kb said its a new operating system, separate 10.5


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## satchmo

Thanks...Excellent! 
I shall wait for the arrival of Snow Leopard.

Hopefully rumours that it's ahead of schedule and may appear at MacWorld, but I highly doubt it.


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## kb244

satchmo said:


> Thanks...Excellent!
> I shall wait for the arrival of Snow Leopard.
> 
> Hopefully rumours that it's ahead of schedule and may appear at MacWorld, but I highly doubt it.


I await it's arrival as well, since from the sound of it, it would be of greater benefit to mobile users (laptops, etc). And I also see it as being more developer friendly for me.

Though course you know this will probably mean that upon 10.6 release we may start seeing an even faster decline in universal-based applications. (it was bound to happen soon).


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## MacGenius24

Do you think it'll run on my G4

I hope it does


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## kb244

MacGenius24 said:


> Do you think it'll run on my G4
> 
> I hope it does


 I assume you're being sarcastic.


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## SINC

I had a lot of trouble initially with Leopard, although it finally settled down and I quite like it. I sure hope Snow Leopard is a much better experience.


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## kb244

SINC said:


> I had a lot of trouble initially with Leopard, although it finally settled down and I quite like it. I sure hope Snow Leopard is a much better experience.


Well hopefully it will be instead of waiting til like 10.6.x (x being some random number between 3 and 20), for it to stabalize


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## bgw

There have been a couple of hints that Snow Leopard would work on G4 and G5 machines but I doubt it (I think kb224 is on the money here!). Getting the code to compile on the older machines is a simple as resetting some compiler switches (assuming none of the code is in assembly language!). However the testing on the older machines will take forever and be very expensive. And fixing the bugs found could compromise the progress made in improving OS X.

If it is faster, more compact and G4 compatible I would love to run it on my eMac. Oh well... so much for wishful thinking...


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## MacGenius24

bgw said:


> There have been a couple of hints that Snow Leopard would work on G4 and G5 machines but I doubt it (I think kb224 is on the money here!). Getting the code to compile on the older machines is a simple as resetting some compiler switches (assuming none of the code is in assembly language!). However the testing on the older machines will take forever and be very expensive. And fixing the bugs found could compromise the progress made in improving OS X.
> 
> If it is faster, more compact and G4 compatible I would love to run it on my eMac. Oh well... so much for wishful thinking...


Dude,

Your eMac is out of of the question for running Snow Leopard. It can't even run leopard. 

Even if Snow Leopard Doesn't run on my iBook I'll Hack It.


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## kb244

bgw said:


> There have been a couple of hints that Snow Leopard would work on G4 and G5 machines but I doubt it (I think kb224 is on the money here!). Getting the code to compile on the older machines is a simple as resetting some compiler switches (assuming none of the code is in assembly language!). However the testing on the older machines will take forever and be very expensive. And fixing the bugs found could compromise the progress made in improving OS X.
> 
> If it is faster, more compact and G4 compatible I would love to run it on my eMac. Oh well... so much for wishful thinking...


It's been pretty much confirmed it'll be intel-only as that is the goal of snow leopard, to scale down on all the older coding to make the operating system much leaner, faster and smaller than it's predecessor. (though I'm trying to find my source).

Kinda like I'm pretty sure that All versions of Photoshop prior to CS5 will probably not work on snow leopard, because adobe has been using Carbon this whole time instead of porting to Coacoa (Which is why we don't have a 64bit version of CS4, but yet CS4 on windows is 64bit). Snow leopard will drop most if not all of the carbon framework. 

Basically its a massive spring cleaning of backward compatibility.

Also trust me, its not a simple matter of flipping some compiler switches. Least not when it comes to an Operating System. Aside from the instruction side, if they go pure-intel they will likely not even have drivers or specific instruction sets for past processors, and the popular hardware that were on them. (ie: even if you recompiled the OS, none of the hardware would work due to no drivers present).

Besides even apple has already made shifts to intel-only software such as versions of iChat and other software. As did Adobe (After Affect, portions of CS4).


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## FlaminWiz

I heard for Mac, there are different versions of the OS with different drivers and something like that. Is this true because if so, and a new version of the iMac is released, it'll be difficult to find a version (DL).


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## hayesk

bgw said:


> There have been a couple of hints that Snow Leopard would work on G4 and G5 machines but I doubt it (I think kb224 is on the money here!). Getting the code to compile on the older machines is a simple as resetting some compiler switches (assuming none of the code is in assembly language!). However the testing on the older machines will take forever and be very expensive. And fixing the bugs found could compromise the progress made in improving OS X.


While true, a lot of benefits of Snow Leopard are due to the architecture of the Intel processors. So, while they could compile it for G4/G5s, is there going to be a benefit?


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## hayesk

MacGenius24 said:


> Your eMac is out of of the question for running Snow Leopard. It can't even run leopard.
> 
> Even if Snow Leopard Doesn't run on my iBook I'll Hack It.


Why would you think it would not run on an eMac but would run on an iBook - they're both G4 machines. Maybe you're thinking of a G3 iMac?


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## bgw

My old eMac will run Leopard, however I'd have to do some serious messing around with the install. Which mainly consists of fooling the install to think the machine is faster, re-installing the older screen drivers, etc. Leopard will run slowly on the machine, but might be adequate if some the eye candy is turned off. There are some software packages that manage the eye candy. The machine only has 640 MB of RAM and really should have a 1 GB to make it really go.

So, if Snow Leopard uses less disk space, less memory, and runs faster it might make my old eMac run quite well. But... I doubt they will be making a G4 version. 

I have read reports of successful installs of Leopard on eMac's with the same spec's (My machine spec's are below). And the clients have been quite happy.


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## MacGenius24

hayesk said:


> Why would you think it would not run on an eMac but would run on an iBook - they're both G4 machines. Maybe you're thinking of a G3 iMac?


aha but i seen the specs of your eMac. 700MHz Right? 

My iBook is 1.33GHZ


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