Apple's latest Operating System 10.7 "Lion" was unleashed from the wild last week (July 21), it's Apple's first OS upgrade and release not to be available on hard media and can only be downloaded. The install was painless, CHF 29 via the App Store.
I upgraded two of my Macs fairly quickly, but kept a couple others running Snow Leopard. Lion isn't to be recommended if you have a bunch of older Adobe products from Power-PC times. Lion rendered my Acrobat 7 and Illustrator CS2 as "no longer supported", but InDesign CS4 and Photoshop CS4 are fine.
I know that there aren't many big ticket changes especially on desktop machines, the changes are more beneficial if you're using swipe gestures on your Trackpad on laptops, many of these motions mirror what iPad users already know. New features such as Launchpad don't innovate anything that simply opening Applications didn't do before, Mission Control (the ability to have several Desktops and Applications open simultaneously) is initially confusing, but I guess that it will become second nature in a matter of time.
A solid release, but nothing that overwhelmed me. Next up is the Mobile iOS upgrade mooted for release this fall with over 200 features promised.
I still can't wrap my head around 'natural scrolling'.
Can this be installed native on standard Intel hardware , i.e. Intel Motherboards dual booting Lion or Linux ?
First thing I turned off.
I Installed Lion on my iMac, had a few hitches after installing it, but nothing serious. The Macbook is going to stay at current version for a while, as my DJ software doesn't officialy support Lion yet.
Agreed. Although it may feel a bit more 'fully featured' paired with iCloud and iOS 5.
what are the advantages of Lion? Why should I pay 29CHF to download and upgrade? (I'm looking for a user response, not an Apple marketing bulletpoint list)
Personaly, it's because I'm Steve Job's Bitch.
I made my own Lion boot/install DVD rather than let the installer run directly. Having the install DVD (or USB stick) means it easy to do a clean install of lion on a blank hard disk - you don't need to install Snow Leopard first.
Users of programs containing the old Power PC code are going to find those programs no longer usable - MSOffice 2004 is an example, also adobe products pre CS5 are not supported. CS2 is out, CS3/4 will run, but with certain limitations as they still contain legacy Power PC code, plus you'll need to download a java runtime environment, but that's not a problem as you'll be asked to do this as soon as you launch an app that requires it, and from the point you say yes it'll be automatically installed.
RoaringApps has a pretty comprehensive list of what will, won't, and sort of works with Lion.
Some reports I've read indicate that there may be problems with the firewire interface after updating, although I've not experienced this with any version of Lion so far (previously I've been running the betas). Also some reports have said that the Mini Display Port has packed up on some macs.
I've got it running on an ancient MacBook, and it seems OK. Pretty much everything functions as expected.
By the way if you want to make your own Lion boot/install disk then simply cancel the installation process before it begins. Right click (or ctrl click) on the install program and select "Show package contents". Inside will be a 3.75GB disk image called "InstallESD" or something. Copy that to the desktop by holding the "alt" key down and moving the file as you would normally. Once this is on the desktop you can then use the Disk Utility program to either burn this image to DVD, or you can use the restore function to write the image to a USB stick.
I'll wait for the bug fixes, a friend of mine installed it last week on a macbook pro which now crahes every 15 minutes :-)
Is there an ISO available ? I would like to try this in a VM under VM workstation first, then consider putting it native on some old quad-core hardware.
I will not install Lion until hell freezes over. Snow Leopard is going to stay in my Macs for a long time.
Apart of having an ill-designed UI, the stupid natural scrolling and having some older programs not working anymore, what are the benefits of the Lion?
That's all good for existing Mac users... But not very good for other OS users who do not have access to a MAC. Thanks for trying though.
Mac stuff is typically not distributed as an ISO. Apple have their own variant called DMG. I'm not sure if this is readable on windows or linux box - well it probably is but you'll need to install something to read it.
I've never tried to shoehorn Mac OS X onto standard intel gear, but it can be done, albeit with some limitations depending on hardware. Do a google on Hackintosh . There's loads of info there about how to do it, although the info may not be relevant to Lion at this stage, nor may it be directly relevant to implementing it inside a hypervisor
As far as getting hold of an "ISO" is concerned, I'm sure you have all the requisite talents to run a "fast moving body of water" type of thing to get it.
I doubt that there is a legal way, but I know for sure that there are isos of the golden master on newsgroups. There are probably torrents available too.
The DMG is available, and I converted it to an ISO, but VM Ware refuses to boot off it. I have tried a few tutorials, but obviously, can't get very far beyond creating the VM vmx and then trying to boot.
As far as I'm aware only hypervisors that are running on a Mac host (and that means Mac hardware) can run Mac OS X as a virtual machine. VMWare fusion, and VirtualBox can both do this in the Mac environment, but they can't if you're running on another system. It might be possible to get around this, but I don't know such trickery myself.
This is a quite good hackintosh site
http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/ and already supports Lion
Same here.. then I gave it a second chance.
Now I'm (slowly) getting used to it and understand the logic behind it, i.e.: no more scroll bars, the mouse pad works like an onscreen experience (you push the page up, you pull the page down).