Mountain Lion Upgrade

I’ve just pulled an all-nighter upgrading the OS on my Macbook Pro from 10.7 Lion to   10.8 Mountain Lion.

Most of that time was spent backing up my existing OS to an external usb hard disk (I managed to grab a couple of hours shut eye while that was going on). However, I probably could have got away without making a backup (not something that I would dream of recommending) as the process went so smoothly.

The installation didn’t take long, and after a restart it was time to do some testing.

The first thing that I checked was the ‘Incompatible Software’ folder that the installer creates. Much to my surprise, it only contained a single kext file for an application that I’d forgotten to upgrade beforehand.

Mountain Lion uninstalls Java, but prompts you to download and install it if you use any java applications. It turns out that iAlertU uses java, so I was prompted to install it immediately after startup. Testing that all was well with my java web applications and IDE lead me to the only issue that I’ve found with the install process;  the apache web server was failing to start. The issue was that the installer had reinstalled the modules folder but had retained the original .conf files. As a result apache was trying to load modules that were no longer on the file system. Restoring mod_jk.so and mod_mono.so from a backup solved this.

I then moved on to testing some applications and started with the ones that I thought would be most likely to cause problems. I tested some Windows games running on the mac under Wine; no problems. Tried VMWare and some emulators (Dolphin Wii Emulator, E-UAE Amiga Emulator and ScummVM). No problems.

Developer, System, Video, Audio, Photo, 3D modelling tools: tried some products from each category no problems, in that any thing that I could run before at least launches, only time will tell if there are any issues whilst  actually using these tools.

I had read that there have been some performance gains by moving to Mountain Lion. One article that I read described applications as opening instantly. I wasn’t seeing any such gains, but I did notice that the Spotlight indexer was running, so I left my mac running and went for some welcome sleep and returned after the indexer had completed. I could see immediately what the author of that review was talking about; Safari and Mail open instantly and the startup times for Contacts and Calendar are visibly quicker. However, I don’t see any such gains for any Apple products such as Garage Band that are supplied separately from the OS or indeed any third party applications. But this does give a glimpse of what’s possible and I’d hope to see Safari / Mail like performance for many apps in future upgrades.

I’m not going to go in to the new features offered by Mountain Lion, there are plenty of reviews out there that go in to these.

If I have one criticism of Apple, I’d have liked to have known in advanced that the upgrade would have gone smoothly rather than taking a shot in the dark. Microsoft had upgrade advisors for Vista and Windows 7 and no doubt for Windows 8, that identify any potentially problematic software on your system prior to an upgrade. If only Apple could do the same! 

All in all, I’d say that the upgrade has been a worthwhile exercise.

Update: I’ve since found another minor issue since upgrading to Mac OS Mountain Lion; That is that when trying to access web content in the ~Site folder (i.e. the user site) the message ‘Forbidden 403’ is displayed instead of the expected content. The fix is fairly straight forward and can be found at:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA25038?viewlocale=en_US