[Macpartners] IS&T Announces Mac OS X 10.2 retirement and an upgrade path to Mac OS X 10.4

[Albert Willis]

Good morning. Information Services and Technology is pleased to  
announce a timeline for retiring Mac OS X 10.2, including an upgrade  
path for Mac 10.2 and 10.3 users to Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" and an  
alert regarding the transition to Intel-based Macs.

Mac OS X 10.2 Retirement
------------------------
Information Services and Technology will discontinue support for Mac  
OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" on February 3, 2006. New versions of applications,  
such as FileMaker Pro 8, and Dreamweaver 8, do not run on Mac OS X  
10.2; we expect that other companies with follow suite and no longer  
support 10.2 as they revise their applications.

Users with supported hardware that will be used for the rest of  
fiscal year 2006 (see "Upgrade Path to Mac OS X 10.4" below) are  
encouraged to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger", Apple's newest  
operating system. However, current users of SAPgui, Tivoli Storage  
Manager and Virex must wait until the Mac OS X 10.4-compatible  
versions of these applications are released by IS&T.

Upgrade Path to Mac OS X 10.4
-----------------------------
For users and support providers who wish to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4  
(from either Mac OS X 10.2 or 10.3), we are providing a list of  
administrative applications and their release timeframes:

* SAPgui 6.40 revision 4 is the only version of the SAPgui that works  
correctly on Mac OS X 10.4. IS&T expects to release SAPgui 6.40r4 in  
early December.

* Tivoli Storage Manger (TSM) 5.3.2 is required to backup and restore  
files completely when using Mac OS X 10.4. IS&T expects to release  
TSM 5.3.2 in January 2006.

* Virex 7.7 is required for Mac OS X 10.4 users; IS&T expects to  
release Virex by January 2006.

Some departments, labs and centers use OpenAFS to access the AFS  
networked file system, including athena.mit.edu. Currently, OpenAFS  
doesn't work with Mac OS X 10.4; a future version will.

The requirements for requesting Mac OS X 10.4 licenses from IS&T are  
as follows:

* an MIT-owned desktop or laptop Macintosh, with an 800 MHz or faster  
processor
* at least 512 MB of RAM
* 3 GB (4 GB if installing the developer tools) of available hard  
drive space

To provide the most value to MIT, only machines that are going to be  
in service until June 30, 2006 or later should be upgraded. Licenses  
obtained from IS&T on machines that are deactivated should be  
returned to the license pool.

Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" Users
-----------------------------
Users and their support providers may decide to continue running Mac  
OS X 10.3 "Panther" until either compatible versions of their  
applications are available for Tiger or until they buy new equipment,  
which will come with Mac OS X 10.4 installed.

Users that continue to run Mac OS X 10.3 should install SAPgui 6.30  
revision 10 when it is released in the next 2-4 weeks. SAPgui 6.30r10  
is required for Mac OS X 10.3 users that have installed the Java  
Security Update from Apple [1]. This update changes the Java Runtime  
Environment, causing some transactions executed using SAPgui 6.20 to  
fail [2]. Once SAPgui 6.30r10 is available, users should install the  
Java Security Update.

[1] <http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/javasecurityupdate.html>
[2] <http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/macpartners/2005-September/ 
001084.html>

Transition to Intel-based Macs
------------------------------
At its World Wide Developer Conference in June, Apple announced that  
it would transition from using PowerPC processors made by IBM and  
Freescale (formerly the semiconductor unit of Motorola) to processors  
made by Intel. At that time, Apple said that it would be shipping  
Intel-based Macs "by June 2006."

It is possible that Apple will ship Intel-based Macs sooner--possibly  
significantly sooner--than June 2006. These new Macs will ship with  
Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" for Intel processors. Using Apple's Rosetta  
technology [3], most existing PowerPC programs will run unmodified on  
Intel-based Macs.

[3] <http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/ 
universal_binary/universal_binary_exec_a/chapter_7_section_1.html>

One important caveat: Classic, which allows applications created for  
Mac OS 9.x and earlier operating systems to run on Mac OS X, will not  
be available on Intel-based Macs. While most users have transitioned  
to Mac OS X-native applications, there are a small number of users  
using Mac OS 9.x-style applications under Classic. These users have  
two options: they can upgrade to the Mac OS X-native version of the  
Classic application that they're using (such as upgrading from Office  
98 or 2001 to Office 2004) or transitioning to a Mac OS X-native  
application such as going from PageMaker, which only runs in Classic,  
to InDesign CS2.

In either case, IS&T recommends that users migrate from applications  
running under Classic; especially those users that expect to purchase  
new Macs in 2006.


Al Willis, for the Mac OS X Release Team <macosx-release at mit.edu>
   Deb Bowser
   Jonathan Reed
   Lee Ridgway
   Helen Rose
   Matthias Thorn
   Karl Witt


______________________________
Albert Willis
Macintosh Platform Coordinator - Software Release Team
Information Services and Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
awillis at mit.edu


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