Effective March 14th 2008, ITS is providing limited qualification of Leopard for use within Weill Cornell Medical College. In short, this allows newly purchased machines with Leopard to be tagged and connected to the network, as well as allow for existing machines to be upgraded upgraded under our Apple Maintenance Program agreement. However, ITS will only be providing limited support for users opting to upgrade or run Leopard, as there are known unresolved issues.
The most substantial issue facing Leopard is a performance issue with ITS' Departmental File Sharing service. Users attempting to connect to the service will experience a delay in connection of up to five minutes. Users may also experience high CPU load during this long connection sequence. Because of this issue, users who do extensive work with departmental file shares are NOT recommended to upgrade to Leopard at this time.
ITS continues to work closely with product vendors to correct this issue, and we expect to have the issue resolved in the immediate future.
Leopard also has a modest increase in minimum requirements over 10.4 ("Tiger"). Leopard requires a computer with the following minimum specs:
- A processor matching one of the following:
- Any Intel processor
- Any PowerPC G5 processor
- A PowerPC G4 processor of 867MHz or faster
- 512MB of memory
- DVD drive
- 9GB of available disk space
Computers that do not meet these requirements will be unable to upgrade to Leopard.
UPDATE: Due to a significant rise in cost, ITS has discontinued the Leopard Upgrade Program. We hope to reinstate the program at some point in the future, but no estimate as to when can be provided at this time. Departments wishing to upgrade existing machines to Leopard should order licenses via the WCMC Apple Store.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns regarding this announcement, please contact ITS Support at support@med.cornell.edu, or 6-4878 from any university phone.