[Macpartners] Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard available for early adopters

[Jonathan McIndoe Hunt]

Good morning,

Information Services & Technology (IS&T) is pleased to announce the
availability of the Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Download Site for early adopters
among MIT faculty and staff.   The site allows you to test and prepare for
support within your environment.  

BEFORE PROCEEDING
-----------------------------------------
Please contact your software liaison to see if licenses for your department
have already been acquired.  Also, contact your local support provider to
check if there may be specific known issues with supporting Leopard in your
area.  To find out who is your Software Liaison visit:
http://web.mit.edu/ist/topics/software/msca-osliaisons.html  

RECOMMENDATION - WAIT ON LEOPARD
-----------------------------------------
IS&T recommends waiting to move to Leopard on production machines.  The full
reasons for the recommendation to wait and current status for Leopard are
available on the Leopard Release Project Notebook at:
http://mit.edu/swrt/releases/macosx/  

Only order licenses for machines that you plan to upgrade to Leopard during
December 2007 because we want to monitor the demand and adoption closely.
You will be able to return to the site to re-download or acquire new
licenses in the future, as needed.  Once the original 1,500 Leopard licenses
are close to depletion, IS&T will purchase additional licenses to meet the
requirements of the MIT community.

In order to stretch MIT's resources as far as possible, IS&T requests that
you only install licenses on machines that will be used for at least one
more year -- through the end of 2008 -- and meet the following system
requirements:

•	A Macintosh desktop with G5 or Intel based processor
•	A Macintosh laptop with a 1.67GHz or faster PowerPC G4 or Intel
based processor
•	1GB (or more) RAM
•	9GB of available hard disk space (10GB if you install the developer
tools)
•	DVD Drive

HOW TO OBTAIN
-----------------------------------------
To obtain licenses and the download, visit IS&T's Mac OS X 10.5 distribution
site at:
http://macosx.mit.edu/  

NOTES:  

•	Requires Dual Layer DVD media
•	If you use a Windows XP or Vista machine to download and burn the
image, use Firefox as Internet Explorer cannot download the file.

GETTING HELP
-----------------------------------------
The IS&T Computing Help Desk is currently offering limited support on
getting connected to MITnet and basic configuration issues for new machines
arriving with Leopard preinstalled.  As critical application issues are
resolved, more in-depth support will be available.

If you have any questions regarding licensing or the Leopard Download Site,
please direct them to vsls-help at mit.edu. Any questions about Leopard can be
sent to macosx-release at mit.edu.  

Jon

___________________________________________________
Jonathan McIndoe Hunt     MIT EECS '97 617.253.0172
Senior Manager Software Services
Client Support Services
Information Services & Technology, MIT
http://web.mit.edu/ist/topics/software/