Feed
< Previous | 1 | 2 | Next >

The Roar of Lion

Avatar Lionel Ogden
While we all wait with baited breath for the wondrous world of Lion. It might be well to pause before being the first one to download it. If the rumour sites are to be believed the move to Snow Leopard with all its missing drivers and incompatible applications will have been a breeze compared to what Lion will have to offer. Earlier versions of MS Office for Mac anyone??

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Euan Williams
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I'm a veteran of system upgrades right from the days when MacWrite and MacPaint were the only software titles, our screen was 9" diagonal, black and white only, and RAM was 128k. MacPaint would crash if you turned just one more pixel to black from white and Sony's floppies were 400k, single-sided. No such thing as a connector for a Winchester Drive. Later on, the 0.9 version of Pagemaker would crash if you wished to add a second page. Arpanet was military and research only. So I confess to being completely unflustered by this change -- for the better.

All this razzmatazz may frighten our more tender horses -- who are entirely free to carry on with any version of MacOSX which suits them, as I do for some software and kit, but Wamug members will be there to help the others. In six months or so Lion will be a pleasantly familiar way to do our thing and we will wonder what the fuss was about.

Why? You did divide your nice big new hard drive into two or more partitions, didn't you?

So, do your housework with Disc Utility. Clone your Snow Leopard installation to a clean second partition and/or external drive if you prefer -- it will run your Mac from there. CLEAN install Lion on a CLEAN partition, and use OSX installation's data transfer facility to bring in selected data from your Snow Leopard partition. Use the option key at startup to choose which way you want to go -- anytime. 1TB Western Digital external drives can be reserved through PC World's website (for collection and payment in your local store) for around £45 if you time it right.

And: all for £20 or so too, think maybe a posh cinema ticket with popcorn and coffee for two? I guess some might even afford a magical trackpad. ;-)

Meantime, more venturesome readers may be encouraged by this article from MacWorld.

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar John Surtees
With a download speed of 1.94 Mb/s, can anyone tell me how long it would take to download Lion?

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Mark Ford
I have been having a clean out in preparation for Lion - mainly PowerPC apps but have come on an Apple application called Backup version 3.2.
What is that for I wonder? How does it relate to TimeMachine? Oops - I see it is part of MobileMe and has been beavering away on my behalf for years! Ho Hum!

It looks as if I will have a scanner driver problem for my CanoScan LiDE80.

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Mark Ford
Canon tell me my CanoScan LiDE scanner is no longer supported. B•m!

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Euan Williams
Mark, try Apple's 'Image Capture' -- it's in your Applications folder, and works with my epson scanner, similarly unsupported. Otherwise there is the redoubtable Vuescan (www.hamrick.com) but that costs!

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Mark Ford
Thanks Euan - I am afraid Image Capture can't see it.
Ed Hamrick said:
" - if you need to use Rosetta to use it with VueScan,
then it won't work with Lion unless Canon releases a universal
binary driver for it."

and Canon said:
"Upon carefully researching your request, we regret to inform you that dedicated drivers for your scanner are not yet available and may not be developed by Canon due to the age/compatibility of your device hardware and the MAC OS X 10.6 and later operating system."

So I guess I am in the market for a new one.

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Lionel Ogden
How does one find out which applications are using Rosetta I always thought my current version of Vuescan was running natively in Snow Leopard.

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar John Surtees
Does everyone feel happy about a 4gig download? I think it would take me about 8 hours. Surely they've got to come up with an alternative.

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Euan Williams
Lionel (Rosetta):
the ‘get info’ window for my old Photoshop CS2 declares it to be a PowerPC application (and it opens with Rosetta). My Vuescan 9.0.31 (trial) ‘get info’ window offers the option to ‘open with Rosetta’.

The quick way to see what runs with which is to open Apple Menu > About this Mac > System Profiler > Software > Applications. (For some reason apparently unknown to Apple, opening the Software > Applications segment crashes some System Profilers, including mine).

John (Lion download):
it seems that Apple want to establish the Mac AppStore in our minds, and having a preliminary “Gosh, cor, lumme. NO WAY!” couple of months of protests is one way to do that -- provided that proper provision is announced for people who really can’t be expected to download 4Gb files when Lion actually does come available. We shall see.

Certainly, not having to manufacture boxes and DVDs, with all the added retail complexities, is cost effective for those happy pilgrims with high download limits and fast broadband. This is reflected in the very low price tag.

Apple have offered download facilities in their stores, and these downloads ‘can’ be burned to DVD. (instructions here.)

Since all Macs registered with a single user id can use the same installer download this would be useful for people with several Lion-capable Macs.

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar John Surtees
Euan. Many thanks for the info. For those of use with less than speedy broadband, this is good news. But should we really have to find workarounds just to update system software. I feel Apple are going to upset more than a few of their previously loyal customers.

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Gordon Clyne
Don't forget the "if it gets interrupted it will pick up from where it left off" technology, so my advice, start the Download when you go to bed, take two Asti spumantis and see it in the morning.

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Euan Williams
Looks like Gordon's Asti Spumanti corks (I will be enjoying Sekt if I can get hold of a bottle) will be popped on Thursday 14th July.

Reports suggest that the Gold Master is very stable in general use.

Instructions for installing a bootable Lion on a Flash driveare here.

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Euan Williams
Here are instructions for using Target Disc mode (Firewire and/or Thunderbolt only) to install Lion.

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Eric Jervis
Happy Bastille Day!

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Contemplating Euan's advice to clone the Snow Leopard installation before downloading Lion, I have been wondering how to cope with our iPhoto and iTunes libraries, which would result in the need for a rather large partition on the backup disc - and the libraries are backed up via Time Machine so don't need to be on the clone backup anyway.

Then I had a thought: The above libraries are all on the iMac, but our MacBook disc is fairly 'clean'. If I were to clone the MacBook Snow Leopard installation, would I be able to boot the iMac from it, should the need arise?

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Euan Williams
Trevor, contemplation is good, more people would get into less trouble were it more widespread.

I use Carbon Copy Cloner (not the only good cloning software, but the one I’m familiar with). It has a very useful feature which tells you whether the combination of files you have selected (including normally invisible UNIX ones such as VAR, etc, sbin) will result in a bootable volume should you decide not to opt for a “full” backup clone of everything.

So, if you want to clone your MacBook in part (to keep a backup copy of your personal OSX setup for starting up “just in case”) you can do an “incremental” backup. Thus you can slim down the numbers of files cloned to keep the overall size manageable, and be sure that all necessary files for booting are included. (Always do a check startup before wiping the original).

I use a “standard” clone of 10.4 Tiger to start up a few rather ancient PPc Macs, as it’s simpler to keep the “standard” clone up to date. These are different vintage machines, some mine, some belonging to friends that may be misbehaving -- the Macs ;-), but they seem entirely happy to share a common System, etc. provided they are technically up to it (RAM, CPU clock speed etc.).

Why not make a clone of your (Intel) MacBook and try it out on your (Intel) iMac? You can’t do any harm to the Macs and you can contribute to the sum of human happiness via this site if it works properly -- as I imagine it will.

Generally people need to bear this in mind: the huge “Macintosh HD” their Mac arrived with can usefully be divided into two or more partitions from day one. My Intel MacBook has four partitions with Leopard, Snow Leopard and, asap, Lion (separately) on three of them. This is great, as I have only the one Intel Mac and a long trail of software and devices.

Hope this helps.

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Thanks for that Euan. I like the idea of trying a MacBook clone on the iMac before going any further. Of course, that means I need to see what space I can free up on a suitable external drive - and that means deciding whether I still need to hang onto my old Panther clone - and that means facing up to whether I am ever going to get my 'desklamp' iMac mended - and that means only one thing. More contemplation!

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Pete Birch
Euan's Tuesday Lion talk keeping is me awake nights deleting programs partitioning drives cleaning permissions cloning drives all the things I should be doing on a regular basis but haven't. Now is also keeping the wife awake. Starting the Mac Pro up at 3am in the morning results in a loud Tarrah from the internal speaker. I know there is a way to turn it off can anyone remind me please

Re: The Roar of Lion

Avatar Euan Williams
Peter: you should really be contemplating at 3.00 am, but if you just can't keep those active fingers from the keyboard, you can always plug a (disconnected) loudspeaker/headset plug of the right size into the appropriate socket. That should mean Mrs Birch sleeps more peacefully. If rumours are true, and there is an upgraded MacPro to tempt us, she may need plenty ;-)

Meantime, while we wait for Apple to get its app store affairs in order, including last minute fixes for one or two problems with the Gold Master, members might like to check out this cuddly lion cub and the changeover advice appended.


< Previous | 1 | 2 | Next >
Feed