Notes on upgrading to Mac OS X Lion

In the engineering wing of my company a majority of us have upgraded to Lion from 10.6.8.

One of the reasons we upgraded was that we could use the new 1.7.x JDK offered by Oracle instead of using the 1.7.x OpenJDK from Google.

Unfortunately there's some work to be done and new ways of doing things in Lion that have changed from 10.6.8.

Some of the tasks you might have to work on, or feature changes you'll need to be aware of, will be:

1) Install more RAM.

     After the install I needed to go from 4 Gigs RAM to 8 Gigs RAM. An additional update. With the new Mac Book Pros with flash drives built in the last few months, 16 Gigs of RAM is even more desirable so I would recommend going to 16 Gigs if your IT department can afford it.

2) Installing the latest JDK 1.7.x from Oracle

     This is an easy download and install from Oracle. There seems to be a new path for the JDK and you'll have to work on your Java Preferences to reenable old Java versions.

3) Getting used to the new virtual desktop layout in Lion.

     Unlike prior versions, the virtual desktops are laid our horizontally and you add more from left to right, instead of classic cardinal direction layout having four desktops arranged in a square like pattern.

4) F8 doesn't seem to work to see all your desktops.

     You'll need to use F3 to see your desktops and add new ones by mousing to the upper right and clicking the plus sign.

4) Using Lion's VPN client instead of Cisco's VPN client

     Cisco seems to not have a VPN client for Lion yet. It stopped working for me once I upgraded to Lion.

5) Getting used to Lion's ostensibly slower user experience

     Lion is definitely slower and if you have encryption features turned on that could also cause additional slowness.

6) ITunes not working anymore if you have an earlier Lion DMG file since it doesn't automatically update ITunes to the latest version.

    Since you might get a Lion DMG installer from a few months ago the ITunes that gets installed could be a few months older and your ITunes will not launch anymore so you'll need to manually download ITunes and reinstall.

7) Having to work on password timeout settings since those will be overwritten. I had a 30 second timeout for a screensaver on my MacBook Pro, which would automatically lock my user session.

     You'll have to update your preferences under System Preferences for Desktop & Screensaver and Security and Privacy.

8) Vertical scrollbars are not automatically enabled.

     This was definitely a huge annoyance for those of us who like using scrollbars instead of the new gestures. Under User Preferences > General I selected Always for Show Scroll bars.