Jefferson Information Technologies
Important Information
Regarding Snow Leopard

Date:                11/18/09

From:               Jeff IT

To:                   All Departments purchasing new Apple Systems

Subject:           Updated Information Regarding the Ongoing Evaluation of Apple Snow Leopard (10.6)

          Jeff IT continues to evaluate the latest Operating System for Apple Systems, Snow Leopard (10.6). The following issues have been uncovered and Jeff IT is actively working with Apple to address each problem. Due to the significant number of issues uncovered Jeff IT will continue to implement the current Leopard (10.5.x) operating system on all new Mac devices. It is recommended that users refrain from upgrading to Snow Leopard until Apple has addressed all issues appropriately.

Issues to date:

  • Updated 11/17/09:  Apple has released a patch to the current operating system that upon initial investigation, corrects the domain authentication problem Jeff IT reported to Apple in October, 2009.  Prior to the patch release, domain authentication consistently failed to work properly, resulting in the inability to manage TJU-MST domain access.  Results from Jeff IT’s initial lab testing are favorable and a pilot group will be testing the operating system in production within the next few days.

  • Updated 11/17/09:  Symantec has recently certified Norton Antivirus v 11 for Mac.  Jeff IT is in the process of testing the application. 

  • University and JUP users have reported inconsistent issues with Citrix after upgrading to Snow Leopard. A reinstallation of Citrix may be required after an upgrade to Snow Leopard.

  • Parallels versions 1 through 3 are not compatible with Snow Leopard. Users must upgrade to Parallels version 4 if they wish to continue to use Parallels software.

  • Reports were submitted to Jeff IT indicating that Microsoft Office 2004/2008 for Mac may crash once the computer is upgraded to Snow Leopard. Jeff IT has not been able to replicate this issue consistently.  However, after loading Snow Leopard, a reinstallation of Rosetta is required in order for Office to function properly. Further, users have reported intermittent slowness in Word on Snow Leopard (even after the re-installation of Rosetta.) Apple is investigating this issue.

  • Snow Leopard running in 64 bit mode may have compatibility issues with a number of third party applications. Post upgrade issues with Cisco VPN Client, Citrix, Firefox 3.5.2 and Logitech Control Center software have been reported to Jeff IT.   

  • Updated 11/18/09:  Adobe Acrobat Professional’s PDF printer fails to function on Snow Leopard. Adobe PDF Viewer Safari plug-in no longer works as well. Apple is investigating this issue.  An upgrade to Adobe Acrobat Professional 9.1, which embeds this capability in the “save as” function corrects the problem.

  • Updated 10/20/09: Snow Leopard users have reported that they’ve lost personal data once they logged into a “Guest” account after upgrading from Leopard, according to messages on Apple’s support forum. Specifically, Snow Leopard’s home directory is replaced with a new, empty copy after users log-in to a Guest account, log out and then log-in to their standard account. All standard folders – documents, downloads, music, pictures and others – are empty, while the desktop and doc have reverted to an “out-of-box” condition.  To date, no reports of this condition have been made specifically to Jeff IT.

Jeff IT will continue to research and test Snow Leopard as well as report issues to Apple. 

 

 


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