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July 21, 2011
OS X Lion - Things to Note Before You Upgrade
OS X Lion - version 10.7 - is now available for $29.99 via the App Store. The upgrade happens over the network, so you don't need any media. The entire process took me about 1.5 hours from a campus network connection and only about 10G of extra disk space was required in the end.
Some things to note about Lion before you decide to upgrade ...
- fink and all fink-installed apps (found under /sw) will need to be recompiled
- the new Mail app is not working with the mathmail.mcamster.ca IMAP server;
I haven't got this sorted out yet - you need to 1) make sure that your ms.mcmaster.ca password is shorter than thirteen characters; 2) either turn SSL off and back on or recreate your mathmail account settings; details here. (updated 2011/0802)
- it works with Univmail and Gmail just fine, though
- XCode (gcc et al.) is not included with the Lion download, but you can install it (for free) from the App Store.
- neither is Java included as part of the Lion installation, but it can be downloaded (for free) from Apple (though not from the App Store, oddly); see http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1421.
the XQuartz build of X11 has some window-focussing issues; the stock OS X X11 appears to work better(it's been several years since that has been the case)- the XQuartz release of X11 of 2011/07/20 works perfectly well on Lion, though the stock version seems to work just fine, too. (updated 2011/07/27)
- autos does not follow certain NFS (e.g. /net/hal/share/macos) properly. Or rather, it follows the specs very strictly, and so certain types of exports which other autofs implementations (e.g. OS X 10.6, most linuxes) have no trouble with, just give errors. This may be tweakable.
A few other notes for those who upgrade ...
- MacTeX/TeXLive works just fine; if you were using teTeX via fink, you should take the opportunity to switch to MacTeX (the Mac bundle which contains TeXLive)
