[Bluspacecow]

Woops forgot my observations for technically minded.

1) When the Cata. Beta Launcher is updating it will have the current build as the last few digits after the "World of Warcraft v4.0.0" in the title bar.

EG mine says "World of Warcraft v4.0.0.11927" meaning I'm at build 11927. Current build as of this post is 12479. As you can see I have a bit to go.

2) in the "Cataclysm Pre-Release 11927 enUS" folder is a .mfil file. This will have a URL that if you put into a web browser will have the size in bytes of the various Installer Tomes , one of them being that large 2.2 GB file you download.

If you're wanting to confirm if you have more to download and have a possibly borked installation check that URL and check the sizes in bytes to what you have.

3) Resuming it I am not completely sure about.

I've noticed that when the Installer is running and downloading that huge 2.2 GB tome it's actually running out of a private system folder on my HD . /var/somethingprivate/something something/Clean up at startup. It's not actually running the Installer program you double click on it's running a copy of it.

Admittedly I did have the installer stall on me a few times and stop. Not sure if this was due to my crappy computer and slow internet. I'm also not sure what I did to get it going again - if I deleted the installer out of that special system folder or if I did some other step.

I do remember running a ps -aweee | grep Installer command and picking up the folder the temporary copy of the installer was running on. Then wiping that. Or maybe I went into that folder and run that copy of the installer.

If you've done it successfully the Installer will say something about calculating the download size. As per usual with unknown , prickley, likely to explode computer stuff make backup copies of the files you are working on first - it would truly suck having to download that 2.2GB again.

4) Intially the installer will attempt to install temporarily into "World of Warcraft Beta.temp". Subsequent failed installs will pick a random set of characters and .temp eg World of Warcraft Beta. World of Warcraft Beta.ea240173.temp

You can check on the progress of your install by going into "World of Warcraft Beta.temp" and tunneling down , listing things by date. Remember to open folders and check modification dates of that.

5) The installer can sort of be paused and resumed. First you press "Stop" then will bring up a dialog box to say "Resume" or "Stop". If you push "Stop" here the installer will be cancelled. I am not sure if it gets rid of your current "World of Warcraft Beta.temp" folder or not.

Hitting Stop and just not pressing anything on the next dialog box seems to stop it momentarily. Hitting Resume and it start downloading files again.

6) I've discovered that like the PTR Beta copies data from Live. This means that if your Live copy has any corrupt data in it your Beta will as well.

So a really good tip is to run the Repair.app on your Live install first before installing it. Mac users try restoring from a pristine back up copy you made.

Techies if you're interested you can confirm this by running lsof | grep World.

This is the first line of my output (all the other lines pretty much just different MPQ files but fairly similar)

Installer 350 accountname 6r REG 14,1 438156720 92023811 /Applications/World of Warcraft/Data/enUS/speech-enUS.MPQ

6) The install was really really slow , even after I had all data downloaded.

Well most of the data downloaded. >_>. Will probably need to redo the entire thing in a few days or so.

7) Lastly I did get a "Unrecognized attribute "quit". (AttributeParser::Parse)" error right at the end when the Installer was all finished and it said installation complete.

For this I just took to mean the program couldn't find the "quit" menu item. "Here Grandpa I'll help you" *quits program*