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."
Good Luch! (Score:2)
Yes, You can download the Lion Developer Preview, but it requires the App Store App, and the process has been a little quirky. Good Luck!
Where the giraffes are, and the zebra... (Score:2)
Yes, You can download the Lion Developer Preview, but it requires the App Store App, and the process has been a little quirky. Good Luck!
And you can only get it in Kenya
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Yes, You can download the Lion Developer Preview, but it requires the App Store App, and the process has been a little quirky. Good Luck!
And you can only get it in Kenya
Well, at least our President can use it then.
Re: (Score:3)
I'd be happy for a <sarcasm> tag, but that would never work.
It's in the HTML6 proposal.
Im sure the lack of said tag will see this get inundated with '[citation needed]' responses.
Fireball! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Fireball! (Score:4, Funny)
> eq
You are using:
[1] <Light> a back-lit keyboard
[2] <Finger> a Ring bearing the Apple logo (hums)
[3] <Finger> a one-button mouse
[4] <Neck> a black turtleneck (glows) (hums)
[5] <Neck> a thick beard
[6] <Body> a black cashmere and silk sweater (glows)
[7] <Head> The Reality Distortion Field (invisible)
[8] <Legs> Levi 501s (hums)
[9] <Feet> A Pair of Comfy Sneakers
[10] <Hands> iPhone 4 (glows)
[11] <Arms> black sleeves (glows)
[12] <Shield> a 17" MacBook Pro (hums)
[13] <About> iPod shuffle (glows) (hums)
[14] <Waist> 1st generation iPad
[15] <Wrist> An iPod Nano (glows)
[16] <Wrist> An iPod Nano (glows)
[17] <Wielded> Shrink-wrapped Xcode (glows)
[18] <Held> An iPod touch (glows)
What is the point of OSX server? (Score:4, Insightful)
Without any server hardware to run it on, why is there even a server setup?
Honestly killing the Xserve and not letting OSX server be installed on another vendors server hardware is brain dead.
Re:What is the point of OSX server? (Score:5, Informative)
Plenty of web developers who use Macs. Plenty of people who want a server but don't require dedicated hardware like the Xserve. Besides, Apple still make servers — check out the Mac mini page.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
We've run Mac OS Server for years using Mac tower hardware. While I was sorry to see the XServe go (we were thinking of buying one), pretty much any Mac, equipped with a good backup system, will function well as a server for a small business or moderate size workgroup.
Re:What is the point of OSX server? (Score:5, Informative)
While you're absolutely correct that the mac mini isn't typical "server grade" hardware, you're wrong about your greater point. The mac mini is just fine for many (most?) people. The default server install does come with 2 disks you can raid, and has a BTO option for an external RAID5 array.
At $600 buy 2 and still be cheaper than most "basic cheap server stuff."
Re: (Score:2)
Here is one idea: http://www.cringely.com/2011/02/attack-of-the-minis [cringely.com]
Re:What is the point of OSX server? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? Time Machine works well, and if the first Mac mini packs up, you and restore on install to the second one.
Re: (Score:2)
You can have more than one Time Machine drive, IIRC.
Re: (Score:3)
A 'server' isn't about serving data but about securing it for 10k+ years.
I think you're confusing "server" with "stone carvings".
Re: (Score:3)
> A 'server' isn't about serving data but about securing it for 10k+ years.
If that's the case, then there are no servers in existence. I don't believe any piece of hardware that you have access to right now can maintain and serve data for the next 10K years.
Re: (Score:2)
You can have more than one TM disk, it doesn't have to be in the same building as the main machine, and you can keep two Minis apart from each other in separate buildings or rooms too. Benefit of them being two separate machines.
For the cost of two of them for the price of your typical server, as long as you actually set them up properly (ie, with genuine backups, redundancy etc) they are perfectly serviceable for many small to medium businesses.
If you need rack mounted hardware with multiple PSUs, then App
Re: (Score:2)
Same with the rack mounted server, fire takes it all.
But you can still rack it if you want , and get load balancing in a 1U form factor.
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmacmini.html [sonnettech.com]
Re: (Score:3)
And a single fire takes them both out, or one angry employee.
And a redundant PSU would definitely prevent that! Take that for not buying real server hardware!
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The folks buying two mac minis, instead of a real server are those who will not know the first thing about keeping backups, syncing the data between the two or doing failover.
It might be ok to keep some dvd rips on at your house, but using it for work is crazy talk.
You remind me of some former coworkers who thought keeping data on anything less than an IBM mainframe with Parallel Sysplex enabled should be considered negligent. There are cases where they are right. However, there are computer users who are not banks, and their inability to understand that some people had different needs than their pet use case made them a real pain to deal with.
Shorter answer: Don't assume you have the answer to everyone's problems. You don't even know what their problems are.
Re: (Score:2)
Those people do not need a server OS then either.
In some cases desktops can work for this purpose for some amount of time. In every case I have seen it resulted in lost data and much downtime. In the end the small businesses decided that it was worth it to either outsource or spend a couple grand on some decent hardware.
Re: (Score:3)
Dunno, many people seem to be collocating them [macminicolo.net].
Re: (Score:2)
You're talking about enterprise grade servers. Why on earth does a small office need redundant PSUs and RAID?
Re: (Score:2)
Don't assume just because the office is small that downtime due to hardware failures is any less devastating to their business. I've had more than one "small office" learn this lesson after I argued that they shouldn't skimp on the redundancy just because it's expensive.
"How much does is cost if your employees are sitting around doing nothing for 2 days waiting for parts to arrive to fix your mission-critical server?"
Re: (Score:2)
Obviously, if your server is mission critical, a Mac mini isn't the best choice.
Re: (Score:2)
I hope you're joking.
Re: (Score:3)
How do you know they won't have real backups? Time Machine and Mobile Me are better solutions than RAID, according to your own criteria.
Re: (Score:3)
The default configuration of the Mini comes two drive which you can configure as a RAID.
And, surely, you're not suggesting RAID is a backup, are you?
An office Mini server with a Time Machine backup is trivial to set up. Plug them all into a UPS. It's a decent solution that works for small offices.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, your obviously not a mac user.
Mac users are quite well backed up, with version history even. Check the versions feature coming seamlessly integrated to OSX lion. Well I guess u need backups activated for that one.
You should go and buy a mac and check how seamlessly we mac users do backups. True, a fire might just take it all, but I have uptodate backups which goes back to oktober 17, 2010.
That is monthly, weekly, daily, hourly backups. Not just a backup I copied once and hope I have left.
BTW, I do also
Re: (Score:3)
If aliens were to drop a dinosaur killer on your town, I doubt you remote backup would be good.
Re: (Score:3)
Most small business don't have back-up power generators, either. Most can handle risking the odd few days off-line, especially when you take into account that an enterprise server requires IT staff to manage it -- that's a huge expense that many people just can't afford. A Mac mini and a few external NAS, RAID, or plain storage drives and some basic back-up plans are a realistic and practical solution for a lot of people.
Re: (Score:2)
...I would rather just go with a larger box that can accomodate a more interesting motherboard.
You can easily get a 2:1 performance advantage at the same pricepoint.
Minis are rather expensive way to avoid any other operating system.
Re: (Score:2)
It runs on hypervisors like VMWare and Parallels which is great for development and testing and actually pretty popular for professional server deployments.
I'm snagging one to light up in VMWare Fusion, for instance.
hth,
adric
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think many people were in the first place. If they were, the XServe wouldn't have been discontinued.
Re:What is the point of OSX server? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has no real interest in the enterprise market.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's the long and short of it. They make OS X Server for people that want file sharing for their small office, or who want a tiny web/mail/etc. server to play with and are comfortable with OS X. They aren't expecting anyone to use it for more than a handful of users, except maybe as departmental node hung off an existing enterprise setup -- it does integrate fairly well with AD or LDAP/Kerberos or NIS/YP and can re-share NFS via AFP and things like that, allowing easier integration of Mac clients into a m
Re: (Score:2)
You're so funny.
Enterprise = narrow margins?
Really. How do you people come up with this stuff.
Seriously? (Score:2)
Without any server hardware to run it on, why is there even a server setup?
The Xserve was really not much more than a rackmount Mac Pro. OS X Server runs just fine on pretty much any Mac.
My office uses a Mac Mini Server as our main office server (our customer-facing services run on other machines). I bought a Mac Mini Server as soon as they came out and it's been running 24/7 ever since. Inexpensive, reliable and even uses less space and power than the machine it replaced.
Re: (Score:3)
The basic servers offered by Dell for businesses of the size being discussed don't have redundant PSUs either. Frequently, they don't have RAID.
Re: (Score:2)
Even the desktops at my house have RAID arrays.
And your toaster has dual PSU's and a UPS. Yeah, yeah, we all know about you, Mr. I-still-have-every-computer-I-ever-bought-still-running.
Your last date was, when?
Re: (Score:2)
Nope, most of those machines are long gone, I only keep the interesting stuff.
I have a live in girlfriend, so the last date was maybe Saturday when we went out to dinner, bar, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think you can call a real doll a live in girlfriend, even if she stays in your house.
Re: (Score:3)
I know that. They're not even terribly glorified desktops, usually - just a tower case and a copy of Windows SBS.
That does not mean that Dell has never sold a single one. Indeed, if Dell had never sold a single one I think we can safely assume the product line wouldn't exist.
Re: (Score:2)
You can put normal 2U servers on 15A 120V, no reason to use desktops based on your power requirements.
Re: (Score:2)
If your home desktop has RAID, you are probably a nerd incapable of thinking like a normal person ;)
Either that, or you bought a consumer-grade machine that was (stupidly) pre-configured with a RAID. (Dell does this, don't they?)
Re: (Score:3)
You can have something reliable without having redundancy built in - redundancy is great, if you need the high availability, but it can get pretty expensive, and if the system isn't mission critical, why spend thousands of dollars on a big server that'll be overkill for your needs?
For low-intensity uses - home office / small office servers, home theaters, lightweight corporate intranet servers, development / test systems, etc., a Mini (or unix/win box with similar footprint) could be perfect for your needs
Re: (Score:2)
Reliability without redundancy is just hope. No special Mac majic prevents hard drives from failing or the power company from killing your power supply.
If 4 hours of downtime every meantime between failures is OK for you, then running a server on a mini is OK for you. Otherwise you're just spouting marketing mumbojumbo. Timemachine backups are awesome (I would never suggest someone run anything without backups), and they are trivial, and well nigh bulletproof. So get a mini. Get an external for backup. Get an Drobo for backup or even for RAID if you want. Get over it. If you can't afford 4 hours of downtime, make sure you use the external raid for e
Re: (Score:2)
A Drobo? Are you fucking kidding?
They are slow, expensive, and poorly built. I say this as someone who got a test unit from CDW and nearly fell off his chair laughing after running bonnie++ on it.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, there's no special magic that prevents things from failing. But component reliability metrics (MTBF, etc.) can certainly be used to judge the relative reliability and expected longevity of a piece of hardware. One Honda is more reliable than one Kia. Two Kias may be more reliable than one Honda, but they'll still probably cost more than the single Honda. Two Hondas would almost guarantee that you'll never be without a vehicle, but it'll also cost you a pretty penny - that peace of mind comes at a
Re: (Score:2)
Which is why you buy two of them.
They're cheap enough (relative to a server with dual redundancy in every component) so that you can run two side by side (yes yes, keep them apart so a fire doesn't kill them both at the same time, or a power failure doesn't kill them both at the same time, keep them on separate UPS setups).
In an area where you need 10 second hot swapping of drives though, it's not your machine. However, still makes it useful for many other server tasks. YMMV. Choice is good. etc etc.
Re: (Score:2)
It will also have more downtime that a real setup, which is fine for some folks.
The reality is that is a good plan that no small business will ever follow that plan. They will also complain about the downtime and never take the spare mac mini off site.
Re: (Score:3)
The server features made a lot of sense if you were selling to businesses that were big enough that they needed a whole lot of extra hardware in the form of servers.
But 90something% of businesses don't fall into that camp, and those that do probably don't want OS X Server. The server aspects are aimed squarely at the small business with a handful of staff, a slightly smaller handful of computers and neither money, time nor inclination to pay someone to set up SBS - but at the same time need something a bit
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm certain your arm chair quarterbacking the largest computer company in the world, and the second largest US based corporation is beyond reproach, but it would be kind to the Apple stockholders (including me) if you'd share some of your data.
Name one advantage Apple gains by sharing their operating system. You want it, but you want the lower prices that multiple vendors imply and the exce
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect that the only people who really use OSX server these days (beyond those you've mentioned) are big Mac labs at Uni's, or big Mac-only departments or businesses, like at the ad agency I used to work at.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone who needs what a full-blown UNIX server offers already knows how to do it in Linux or FreeBSD. OS X just adds a layer of confusion, not connivence. Case in point, OS X will let a non-administrator user setup crontabs, but they are erased on reboot. Meanwhile, administrator crontabs stick regardless. The idea is to move to launch daemons but -- why bother with these idiosyncrasies when it's not really broken in the first place? How about config files present in /etc that don't actually do anythin
Re: (Score:2)
My companies website is hosted on an iMac you insensitive clod!
The Bondi Blue one?
You really should have held out for the Graphite model.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, we used to have 3 bondi blue iMacs, running 2 DNS servers, 2 Web Server, Mail server, 4D database, and filemaker database.
And af few Apple Scripts for automating picture management.
That was before PHP4, and other scripting systems that today manipulate graphics directly. Did stuff that 5 years ahead of similar stuff started to be available mainstream by other techniques. Btw it was Photoshop that did all the picture manipulation.
Only thing that didn't really work well with the set up where the Web ser
Mixed bag (Score:3)
Full screen apps? Oh no! I hate when an application provides a nonstandard UI. The screen shot shows that even the menu bar is gone, which I find unacceptable for everything except media playback.
Autosave, Versions and Resume on the other hand are fantastic and long overdue. It'll be interesting to see how they implement Autosave: the easy way would be to save every x minutes, the right way would be to create a transaction log and save every action (keystroke, mouse gesture), to make sure that when you crash, every action up to the moment of the crash is preserved.
Re: (Score:3)
I'd be happy with a real maximize button. For Windows users, what logically should be the maximize button (green +) is actually a "right size" button that performs application dependent actions.The response on all the Mac forums to requests for how to change the behavior to a maximize button is that nobody should ever need or want to maximize an application, because it is not the "Apple Way".
The addition of full screen apps seems to suggest even Apple recognizes there are times when using all the screen mak
Re: (Score:2)
From my understanding, the green '+' button is being repurposed to do the full-screen thing. I just wish I could resize windows from any of the borders, rather than the bottom-right corner. That's my biggest irritation with the UI.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In Windows, I accidentally resize windows I'm trying to move much more often than I resize a window on purpose.
Well, I hate the windows "solution" (Score:2)
I like the green + and the zoom button before it - done right in the beginning back in the 80s. I almost NEVER need to maximize an app there are only a few apps worth doing this for and the rest are consumer toy apps / games (games always were able to go fulls screen.)
Apple guidelines and API pushed leaving zoom to act just 1 way all the time. A simple revision in the guidelines and maybe 1 option in the API could let SOME apps "smart resize" to full screen because the smart size sometimes is full screen.
Re: (Score:3)
Is it really that difficult to set the app you want to open a file with? Command - I + Open With is your friend. No need to change all associations either as you can set it for specific files.
But will the server provide useful SOHO features? (Score:3)
Meh. Missing features. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Lack of TRIM support is annoying, and hopefully it's just a feature that hasn't been announced yet. For now, you can always get a drive with a SandForce controller. In fact, this is what everyone recommends doing.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's especially strange when you consider the Air comes with an SSD... Then again, I'm not sure who the manufacturer is.
Re: (Score:2)
Adobe stuff doesn't seem to mind anymore so if they can do
Re: (Score:2)
OSX doesn't 'need' TRIM, but without it, you'd better have a controller with excellent background garbage collection, or you're going to suffer performance penalties after a few weeks or months. Unless you stick with the SSD that Apple ship with, in which case I believe you're stuck with that poor performance to start with (far better than spinning media, but not as fast as competing SSDs).
And I'm not stating that OSX is so stupid that it prevents the user from manually putting data elsewhere (like iTunes'
OS X Lion virtualization? (Score:2)
Far better features (Score:2)
Bah, there's a lot more features than just the eye candy. The Lion page in the summary has a lot more newsworthy new features IMO:
Autosave:
Full screen apps (Score:4, Insightful)
The app and nothing but the app. On iPad, every app is displayed full screen, with no distractions, and there’s one easy way to get back to all your other apps. Mac OS X Lion does the same for your desktop. You can make a window in an app full screen with one click, switch to another app’s full-screen window with a swipe of the trackpad, and swipe back to the desktop to access your other apps — all without ever leaving the full-screen experience. Systemwide support allows third-party developers to take advantage of full-screen technology to make their apps more immersive, too. So you can concentrate on every detail of your work, or play on a grander scale than ever before.*
Re: (Score:3)
Finally! The inability to have a real full screen application was one of the most frustrating aspects of transitioning to Mac OS X.
The upcoming "Full-screen" feature is not the same as Windows' "maximize" button. It causes the app to use 100% of the screen, hiding the doc and the menubar and window decorations and anything else that is not the app. It is the same thing that some other apps (eg, Lightroom, Photoshop) have done on their own for a while. This is just Apple adding similar functionality to the apps that ship with OS X. More third-party apps will probably support this too, because, depending on the app, it can be a very
encryption (Score:2)
Still no word on decent built-in encryption. Whole disk encryption out of the box and encrypted Time Machine backups, then we're talking.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, good news, I was wrong [theregister.co.uk]!
Apple has finally updated its FileVault feature to offer high-performance, full-disk encryption for local and external drives. Current versions of OS X allow users to encrypt only their home directory, a shortcoming that allows snoops easy access to many sensitive files that by default are stored elsewhere. Under Lion, FileVault also has the ability to instantaneously wipe data from their Macs, although we're not sure this improvement will extend to flash-based solid state drives.
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: (Score:2)
Everybody off the Xeroscaping, please.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
the format is nicer than the applications folder, and one can just think of it as a nicer implementation of the windows start/applications menu (does it still have that? i haven't used it since xp).
it is redundant with the dock, except that it's more easily navigated. the dock just gets too cluttered so rather than try to decide what to put on it, i just empty it and use it as a task switcher, if at all.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, definitely looks like this iteration is for people whose first Apple device was an iDevice to make them feel more comfortable with the OS. Everything from the gestures to the new UI components.
I don't picture myself using a lot of these features, such as full screen apps, Launchpad or Mission Control. Well, maybe MC (what goofy name) if it's better at windows management than Spaces+Expose.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, just use an activation key. You will have to setup your own repo or find one that already does that. Ubuntu has such a repo used for pay for codecs and the like.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Snow Leopard already has the Mac App Store.
Re: (Score:2)
Misunderestimated vocabulary (Score:2)
And yet another person doesn't understand that "tithing" means giving 10%. No more, no less.
Yeah, we should round up these fools and decimate them! Then we'll be rid of them altogether!
Re: (Score:3)
I'm just wondering when the MacPro is going to be discontinued, what consumer needs 16 cores?
Anybody planning on running Flash.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm just wondering when the MacPro is going to be discontinued, what consumer needs 16 cores?
Anybody planning on running Flash.
Wait, so you're saying that flash will use those cores effectively?
Re: (Score:3)
It will try.
I'm almost certain Flash has an "calculate Pi to 30,000 digits" thread that it launches on n-1 cores, where n is the number of cores you have. It then uses that last core to run some SETI at Home.
Re: (Score:2)
>> I'm just wondering when the MacPro is going to be discontinued, what consumer needs 16 cores?
>
> Anybody planning on running Flash.
Nope. Flash just needs one good core.
Admittedly, such a core might be hard to find on any Mac that isn't a Mac Pro.
Re: (Score:2)
Apple has always made the most overpriced kit in the industry.
That never changed really.
Although direct comparisons are a easier these days.
Re: (Score:2)
Where have you been hiding? It launched on 10.6.6 not long ago. All that "lulz it's just a package manager, how innovative!" stuff has been done.
Oddly enough, as the benefits of a package manager were strongly promoted by the OSS community. What on earth would make Apple consider using something that other OS users have said works well?
Beats me!
(Note that they are not claiming to have "invented" the concept, just that they are [already] shipping it).
Re:Cat theme (Score:5, Funny)
Actually until Snow Leopard, Apple seemed to be naming their OS after German tanks. Now I'm not saying they are... I'm just asking questions and you should too.