OK, I seem to have made it. The installation of Jaguar itself was not too much of a problem, and went smoothly on my newly created parition, which I appropriately named Feles Ferox, or Wild Cat. The biggest problem with harddisk management on the Macintosh is not connecting or installing the harddisks themselves, but finding good names for them. The canonical "Macintosh HD" is far too boring, so now I have succumbed to Latin allitterations. Combine that particular afflictions with my waning knowledge of Latin in the first place, and naming a partition becomes a major undertaking, but one that is concluded in general to the satisfaction of all concerned (being me). That was the easy part.

As the installation was a new partition, none of my preferences or installed apps was carried over. So I created myself as a user again (pesky Unixisms creeping in), then deleted my user directory and replaced it with a symlink to my old home directory on the other partition where I'm keeping 10.1.5. That sort of worked, but few files were accessible. It was, of course, a permissions problem. On the 10.1.5 system, user qsi had a different ID (I think it's kept in NetInfo) from the one in 10.2, so all permissions were screwed up. Fortunately chown and chgrp have the -R flag for recursive modifications, because otherwise I'd have ended up digging more deeply into bash scripting than I had ever cared to. Considering I know next to nothing about bash scripting, this is very lucky indeed.

I spent the rest of the day playing around, making sure everything worked properly (well, some things did). I had to re-enter some registrations for shareware, and re-install haxies and such. I also discovered that there's an Unsanity Blog with some interesting OS X related programming items.

My main observation of Jaguar is that it feels snappier (not as snappy as OS 9, or indeed as my XJ40, but that's a different story). The other big observation is that apps seem to be crash-happier. Internet Explorer has crashed on me today more often than during the past month on 10.1.5 while visiting essentially the same sites. In one of the crashed, even Console crashed when creating the crash report. This is worrying.

For the most part, I am up and running. It was definitely not as easy an upgrade as OS 9, but manageable.