Housebreaking Mt. Lion

New Cat in the House (NOT a New Cathouse)!

I waited as long as I could (poor impulse control) and finally ponied up the $20 for the newest OS Mountain Lion (OSX 10.8.1) on my 2011 MacBook Pro 13" (Jan. 2012) If you are an Apple hater, feel free to bail out now; if you are an Apple fanboy/girl I may just offend you too.

Preparation

Needless to say, I hope, there is some homework to do before you download even if your faith in the house that Steve built is next to Biblical.  Not all of your current software will necessarily be compatible with the new OS. This is not necessarily Apple's fault all the time because some companies just decided that you would need to buy an expensive upgrade of their wares in order to be compatible e.g. in my case Fusion vs 5 $50 or they just flat discontinued compatibility viz. Pro Tools LE 8.0.  The bottom line is to research ahead of time so that there are no nasty surprises.  For instance I decided to use the Boot Camp feature of Mt. Lion to install a dual boot version of Windows 8 Enterprise and I switched editing software to Amadeus Pro for $60 vs. nearly $400 for the baseline Pro Tools Edit Suite.

The next step is to make sure that you have a good back up copy of your previous OS (Lion or OSX 10.7 in my case) before you make the big leap.  Either burn it onto a DVD or USB stick or External HD just in case it all goes sideways, darned gremlins, don't ya know.  

My partner Cal Carson from the Internet Advisor show suggested using the SuperDuper app to burn a complete image of your current system as a safety back up on a removable drive.  Then he suggested installing the new Mt. Lion OS on another external HD and using that as another Start Up Disk (see System Preferences.)  That way you can boot into the new OS on the external HD and see if you like what you see before you buy the farm or more specifically sell the old one!

The download and saving the Install Disk

Like any purchase from the App Store, was pretty seamless since I was already using Lion (OSX 10.8). As a cautionary note I spent a good deal of time researching how to download the new OS and burn the Install Disk to a DVD only to find that even though the file is 4.35 GB, the system will not allow you to burn it to a normal DVD (4.74 GB) Huh?!  you say?  Yeah, my reaction too.

There was a cool post online about an Apple script that would fool your OS into thinking that the Install Disk was actually smaller (someone suggested that it just removes the foreign language scripts) and then allow you to burn it to a DVD.  No dice; either I couldn't figure out how to follow the directions about using Terminal (a very likely choice) or it just didn't work.  The solution?  Buy a $6 8GM USB stick at the counter of Micro Center in Madison Heights, MI (find a good deal wherever you want for a cheap one because this is just going to be filed away in case of disaster.  Just don't forget where you put it!  LOL)

I should mention that there is a little free utility that automates the burn which can be found on a number of sites that feature the instructions on burning Mt. Lion to a USB or external HD. (Just don't use the original one that still has the French instructions as part of it.  That one didn't work which raised my BP a few points until I found the right upgrade on another site.)

The Install

The install itself was pretty seamless and basically involved walking away from the computer for about an hour followed by a few anxious moments as I waited for the reboot.  No big drama but I did receive

In my next installment I will chronicle some of the ups and downs of housebreaking this cat including some annoying basic issues (how about your Track Pad doesn't work without a "fix" from one of the forums!)

Tata y'a,
Foster