Mastodon
July 23, 2011

My Experience with Mac OSX Lion

So I was eagerly anticipating the release of Mac OSX Lion.  It’s not cause I’m a huge Mac fan or anything – far from it, but I like new toys and Windows 7 is getting old.  I have a Mac Mini server at the house that I use for day to day ‘house’ use and as a toy.  It provides decent amount of entertainment.  So when Lion came out, I was prepared:

  • Had run Disk Utility to check for errors – there were errors so I had to get into safe mode to do a disk check thing.  Pretty hard to do when all the instructions are ‘boot from the DVD and run it in the GUI’ – cept I don’t have a DVD drive on the Mac Mini and couldn’t for the life of me get Remote Disk to work from my Windows machine.  That’s just dumb.  But whatever, go that fixed.
  • Updated to 10.6.8.  This is normally a decently seamless process for most folks, however, my Mac mini, for reasons passing understanding, never would update automatically – would always get hung on ‘moving files into place.’  So a manual install of that from Apple support did the trick.
Next up was to get Lion.  Now, folks have been preparing for this for a while now, so I will admit to my surprise the sheer number of things that weren’t ready.  Lion reminds me of Windows Vista!  Check out the decently long list of things that are now busted:
  1. I use DisplayLink USB port to add a second monitor.  Fail.  New driver – coming soon.
  2. I use AirDisplay from Avatron to add screen sharing to my iPad.  Fail.  New driver – coming soon.
  3. I have an Iomega d200 NAS that keeps all of our everything on the network.  Their AFP driver is now blocked by Apple for TimeMachine and basic network access.  Fail.  New driver(s) – coming soon.
  4. The built in web server (wiki, blogs, etc.) that come with Apple Server which was working fine under Snow Leopard.  Fail – everything is 503’ing.  I can get it to render but only if I turn off Wiki.  Ability to ‘reset or reinstall these components?’ Missing entirely.
  5. The new much hyped ‘Server’ app – massive Fail.  First, they moved some functions of server out of Server Manager to Server, but not all of them.  So I had to go download the server admin tools just to manage things like DNS/DHCP/XSan (for Podcasting), etc.  The other things like Web/Email/etc that did move to the Server app – no ability to natively see the logs to try to find out what’s wrong.  Massive.  MASSIVE FAIL.  Not being a *nix nerd, I don’t know what to do to try and get these things back up and going.  The Google’s seem to indicate it’s a permissions problem.  Nice.
Otherwise, it sure does look perty and seems to have some interesting new features but holy crap.  I thought Mac stuff was supposed to ‘just work.’  Seems a lot like the pot calling the kettle black looking back at those hilarious Apple commercials.  Anyways, I’m sure things will get cleaned up, particularly on the 3rd party side, but Lion’s been in dev for a while – you’d think vendors would have learned from Microsoft and Vista.