"LONG time reader, first time contributor. I'm currently doing a mass deployment of 10.5.7 and 10.6.2 for an Australian uni.
1500 Macs, 110 apps. We're keeping 10.5.7 around for a while because some apps are bailing under 10.6, and we don't want 2 versions of 10.5 around - an upgrade to 10.5.8 for the 10.5 boxes is at least a month or so away.

Anyway, we put our automated install of 10.5.7 on a new Late 09 C2Duo machine (21.5" and 27") and it worked EXCEPT for brightness controls (presumably a driver issue re. LED lamp) and intermittent issues setting the volume on the keyboard.
(FYI: In Friday's news a reader said you can work around the display brightness adjust by using ScreenShade 1.3.)
Everything else appears fine.
Upgrading the test macs to 10.5.8 did not fix the issue.
(I asked David if he could check airport card/wireless support in 10.5.8.)
You're right, Airport doesn't work. The interface is detected in System Preferences and System Profiler, but the hardware device is disabled. Trying to turn it on in the Network preferences pane does nothing. This was on a 21.5", I assume a 27" would be the same.
(and asked if the new iMac's airport card was Broadcom (most common) or Atheros (back when apple first switched to N cards in macs some notebook owners reported the card was an Atheros AR5008 IIRC (from notes on Mac 802.11N page here back then). IIRC the AR5008 had triple antenna inputs (vs 2 on the Broadcom N cards)-Mike)
It's an Atheros... we deploy dual boot labs and the driver needed for the Airport is an Atheros driver. Can't give you an exact chipset # until after the weekend.
-David V."

After getting David's report last night I wrote Hans (that posted first feedback yesterday) about the brightness adjust:

"You are absolutely right. It is not possible to adjust brightness on the display. But luckliy we always do an calibration with xwright eyeOne calibrator - so it takes care of colorbrightness and coloradjustment. That actually means that our users are unable to "ruin" the display settings.

I have also noticed that during startup the display shows an ugly black/grey pattern between the grey screen and the logon window - just a few seconds. Obviosly the ATI drivers are not included in the 10.5.8. Might be an graphic-driver update fro ati or Apple later on.
Anyway - hope to go to 10.6 early next year on all our macs.
Hans-Petter Kiese
Oslo, Norway"

And a reply from the original reader that asked about this (business owner that needed better printer, etc. support in 10.5.x vs SL) that noted he's not been able to get wireless working:

"The Airport Card doesn't work either. This wouldn't be a big deal as it would be hardwired into the network. I am installing updates right now.
I installed some updates and the airport card doesn't work. There are no more updates listed.
(here's an earlier reply after I sent him a FYI about the display brightness adjust not working)
I tried booting from my portable fw800 drive (OWC drive) this morning with 10.5.8 loaded and it boots just fine. The display brightness doesn't work. The other standard apple Function keys work, Expose spaces etc.
Thanks for your help -James"

And another mail on the subject:

"Apple keeps it quiet but they would sell, over the phone only, a copy of Leopard for use with a new Mac that otherwise ships with Snow Leopard. As a matter of fact the quad-core iMacs could run Leopard they assert. While the current core 2 duo models I can believe, but traditionally the older OS did not have support for processors that came out after they did. I guess the Core i5 and i7 models act like a Mac Pro Xeon model and thus 10.5.8 should work there.
-Bradleu"

As mentioned here a day or so after the new imac release, the quad-core iMacs use a different motherboard than the C2Ds or 'true' Core i7's - it's assumed to be a P55 chipset motherboard and I wasn't sure about support for that in 10.5.8.

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