Mac OS X 10.7 'Lion' Developer Preview Available 365
kwolf22 writes "Today Apple is offering a developer preview of Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) to registered Mac developers. In addition, the Lion product page has been updated with new details. Among the updates is this exciting bit of news: Lion Server is now part of Mac OS X Lion." Adds reader Orome1: the new OS X "features Mission Control, a new view of everything running on your Mac; Launchpad, a new home for all your Mac apps; full screen apps that use the entire Mac display; and new Multi-Touch gestures. Lion also includes the Mac App Store, a place to discover, install and automatically update Mac apps."
Maybe for you or me (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe they're envisioning people buying a lot of widget-style apps.
It sure seems like it would be convenient for people like my parents.
Re:Launchpad (Score:4, Interesting)
The nice thing with Launchpad is being able to reorganize your apps without actually changing the location of the application bundles themselves. For whatever reason, Bad Things can happen if you do this yourself in your Applications directory.
That said, I probably won't ever use it much. Alfred (or any other launcher) is way faster, anyways.
Cat theme (Score:1, Interesting)
Has anyone else noticed that Apple seems to be using a cat theme for their X series of MacOS?
Re:What is the point of OSX server? (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple has no real interest in the enterprise market.
And this is terrible news.
Content providers for apple MUST provide video files in Apple ProRes fileformat which is ONLY able to be encoded using apple's tools which only run in OSX. I don't know how apple expects large content producers to encode high-volumes of videos for them without the xserves. MacPros are not an option as they are not enterprise ready (single PSU, no management port, they're HUGE and must be de-"racked" in order to swap drives, etc). MacMinis are not suitable for this as they don't have enough CPU/RAM. The xserves weren't even that great, but they were the right form factor.
Apple's been seriously fucking up with regard to the enterprise lately. I've been running into issues with their commandline admin utilities --they don't give access to everything that you can do with the GUI. You can't configure which port to use for management from the CLI (the docs say you can, but it doesn't work), it renames your interface when you bond network interfaces by appending " Configuration" to the name, which doesn't happen in the gui... and now, 10.6.6 doesn't properly image using System Image Utility (http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3665)
Now, they're bundling OSX Server into OSX Lion. Who knows whether they'll continue to support ALL of the non-home user features of server like OpenDirectory. WTF.
Re:What is the point of OSX server? (Score:5, Interesting)
docs were read. mass-googling was done. I'm talking about apple's utilities... `networksetup` in the instance of the LOM and the network port bonding. There's no consistency in the docs about what they mean by "Service Name" which is what they call the "interface." However, there are 2 names for the interface... the user-specified one ("Ethernet 2") and the bsd name ("en1"), but the docs call them both the servicename. The only way I was able to figure out which gets used where is by trial and error.
in many cases, apple has provided their own tools that completely replace the standard toolset. hdiutil and networksetup are 2 prime examples.
another thing I forgot to bring up is ipmitool which mostly works unless you try to do serial-over-lan (sol) connections; it's completely unusable and you have to go to sourceforge and build your own ipmitool to do that stuff.
I mean, I'm not an OSX n00b. Typically I'm a linux engineer, but I've been OSX on the desktop since the developer previews and the server I've had running at home for a while and I've done contract server set up on versions going back to jaguar... the thing is that this is the first time that I've had to do seriously low-level shit (building a large xserve infrastructure with customized management and deployment tools) and it's like running into a concrete wall headfirst every time a new task comes down the pipe.