Last night I upraded from 10.3.9 to 10.4. I tried something I haven't done before, which is clone a system to an external drive, upgrade the clone to the new OS, and then boot from the external drive. My rationale is that if something goes wrong I can easily switch back to my pristine Panther volume on the iBook internal drive.
I chose the basic "Upgrade" option, even though I have read elsewhere that people are tending toward "Archive and Install." Since this was an experiment, I figured that I might as well try the Q and D upgrade path. Plus I have quite a few third-party apps and haxies, so I was curious to see how things would work after the upgrade.
By customizing the installation I was able to get it below 900MB, which was sweet because my 30GB G4 iBook drive (and the clone partition on the external drive) has less than 10GB available space. I got the installer going and when I returned 20 minutes later Tiger was Up and Running. After answering a few set-up questions I was good to go, less than thirty minutes after I began the process.
So far, so good. I have done all my normal routines since last night and I haven't encountered any problems. I did have a glitch in the Finder menu bar where menu titles were screwed up when the Finder was the front app, but that symptom hasn't appeared since last night. I've seen the problem before in Panther and it is no doubt due to some interaction between all the icons I have in the menu bar and the system. It doesn't affect performance... it just looks a little funny. If that glitch is all I experience I will count myself very lucky indeed.
I was concerned that support for my LaserWriter 360 would vanish with the advent of Tiger, but it still works great with an AsanteTalk adaptor.
I'm going to run my iBook this way until I'm confident there are no problems, and then I will apply the upgrade to the iBook itself.