I decided to take the plunge into OS X Lion. Based on previous experience with .0 releases of OS X, you’d think I’d know better than to install another one, but alas I simply couldn’t wait. 🙂 This article will chronicle surprises and workarounds I’ve dealt with along the way.
I have a few different machines at home:
– Late 2007 13″ MacBook
– Late 2009 27″ iMac
– Early 2010 13″ MacBook Pro
The MacBook Pro is provided by my employer, so it won’t be touched.
the iMac
I started with the iMac. Download of Lion was smooth with decent bandwidth. It took a few hours, but I figured it would. Keeping the non-technical user in mind, I figured that Apple would take the approach of removing the installer once it was installed, so I backed up the disk image (http://osxdaily.com/2011/06/08/create-burn-bootable-mac-os-x-lion-install-disc/) to my NAS before installing. Good thing I did as the installer was removed. Install was smooth. No issues.
SSL Issues
The only major issue I ran into was that SSL wasn’t working in Chrome or Safari, which also caused problems for iTunes and the App Store. I run a Squid proxy at home, and even though I don’t have SSL going through the proxy (it goes DIRECT instead), I still had issues. Turns out I needed to check the “Automatic Proxy Configuration” box as well (https://discussions.apple.com/message/15663396#15663396) in the Network Settings, something not previously needed.
Multiple Desktop Screens
The one minor issue I had was that I previously had four desktops, configured through spaces, but I couldn’t figure out how to do the same in Lion. Completely by accident, I figured out that when I was in the Mission Control environment, placing my mouse pointer on the right edge of the screen near the top, caused a plus (+) icon thingy to pop out. Clicking it allowed me to create more desktops. I later found in the Keyboard section of the System Preferences that I could change the keyboard shortcuts to flip between screens. My old settings were carried over from Snow Leopard, so no changes were necessary.
the MacBook
Last night, I stayed up until 03.00 working on the MacBook. Ha!
Knowing that Lion was coming out soon, I figured this would be a good time to also add some RAM and upgrade the HDD in the machine. I planned to go from 2G to 4G of memory, but unfortunately one of the memory sticks I bought seems to be bad as the Mac beeps in a very upset manner, and Google tells me that the particular beep sequence means the memory isn’t passing checks. So, I’m only at 3G instead of 4G.
For the HDD, I choose the Seagate Momentus XT 320G as it has 4G of MLC cache added on, and the drive will cache frequently used things on its own. I