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OS X Mavericks GM is out – how to make a bootable installation USB
The golden master for OSX Mavericks is out! For all you guys who wanna try it out, but need to install it via a USB, here’s a super simple way to do so.
- casperc 13y agoI'm looking at their App Nap functionality and I am wondering how it will affect applications that do background work. It looks to be on by default unless expressly turned off by the app. Does it apply to all processes or what is their definition of an app? I wouldn't want just anything to be suspended when I don't have it on my screen (any work that I started and am expecting to continue in the background basically).
- riffraff 13y agoI'd suspect it is limited to Cocoa stuff, so GUI only. It should be controllable via a setting anyway.
- joezydeco 13y agoCan anyone with an iMac (and not a notebook) comment on how Mavericks performs there? I've got a 2008 iMac 2.8 dual-core that I thought was getting pretty long in the tooth, but I'm thinking it's just the 4GB ram that's holding it back now. I can't add any more RAM and Mountain Lion just draaaggggss on it.
- micro-ram 13y agoMavericks adds ram compression. I don't know if it will turn out to be just a gimmick. I have been testing on a 2009 iMac with only 2GB ram w/ Intel SSD and it does just fine. Compressing 200-300MB when I check Activity Monitor.
- glhaynes 13y agoI hadn't noticed the "compressed" field in Activity Monitor, thanks for pointing that out. On my 8 GB Mac running quite a few things (Eclipse, Xcode, tons of Safari tabs, all the "standard" built-in apps open), mine's showing "Compressed: 3.21 GB" right now.
- bluedino 13y agoHave you thought about adding an SSD?
- joezydeco 13y agoI have, but on a 2008 it's a major surgery.
- luismarques 13y agoConsider adding a Firewire 800 SATA enclosure. Then you can externally add an SSD or an HD for increased throughput (e.g. put the root on the internal drive, your home on the external one; or using OS X logical partitioning to combine both drives into a single volume) Dont bother with a top of the line SSD, since the FW 800 can be saturated by mid-range SSDs.
- megrimlock 13y agoI have done it and it's not bad. Well worth the trouble and makes a 2008 feel like a new machine. There are detailed tutorials online with pics and everything you need.
- joezydeco 13y agoYeah I was on the fence about it but I might take the plunge soon. I've read the guides over and over and the only scary part to me is the LCD manipulation and coverglass removal.
- kayoone 13y agodo it! plus upgrade the ram and you will be happy for another 2-3 years with that machine!
- teilo 13y agoI have replaced drives in these models a number of times. It is not that hard. You don't have to do a teardown or anything. You just have to remove the keyboard. There are just a lot of screws, and you have to be careful with the keyboard ribbon cable. Make sure you are on at least 10.6.8, and don't forget to install Trim Enabler. (For 10.6.8 you need version 2.2). http://www.groths.org/software/trimenabler/ http://www.groths.org/software/trimenabler/
- luismarques 13y agoActually, unofficially, the older iMacs support 6 GB (4+2) since the first aluminium iMac (mid 2007, I think) I bought a 4 GB DDR2 DIMM for my Dad's mid 2007 iMac, installed it together with a 2 GB DIMM and it has been running non-stop for almost a year now, without any problems. DDR2 is now a bit expensive, due to being old, the 4 GB DIMM cost me around 50$ on eBay.
- joezydeco 13y agoI've seen that unofficial fact but never heard from anyone that actually had it done. Thanks. If I go to 10.9 I'll definitely up the RAM.
- eunice 13y agoOn a mid-2010 iMac with 4GB I find it snappier than 10.8
- Bvalmont 13y agoBeen on Mavericks for about a good week now. Was pretty much a painless move, the only problem I had was that at this moment After Effects CC is unsupported. It's a real tangible performance boost though. Feels extremely snappy on my Retina Macbook Pro. Scrolling is faster and I went from 2,5 hours of battery life to 4,5 !
- kristofferR 13y agoI was just about to say the same thing - it's stunning how much faster/smoother it is. The new way Multi Display works is also much better than the old way, Full Screen Mode is actually really useful now.
- micro-ram 13y agoYou just can't span multiple monitors with a single window. I do like the improvements though. Moving the Dock to a different window by pulling the mouse below the bottom of the screen is taking some getting used to.
- Someone 13y agoIf that battery life improvement is representative of general use, it is another indicator that they really are pushing for energy efficiency. The first one, for me, was https://developer.apple.com/osx/whats-new/ https://developer.apple.com/osx/whats-new/, where the top item for "develop for OS X Mavericks" is "Energy Saving", not any of the new libraries whose coolness one can demo in a few minutes.
- tuananh 13y agoyou get only 2.5 hours on MBP Retina !?!?
- terhechte 13y agoI've updated to Mavericks about a week ago, just before attending a conference, and I've had a fair share of problems, though it seems that (based on Google Searches) I'm in the minority with the main issue: I can't use tethering with my iPhone anymore. Wireless or wired tethering will setup just fine, and I can even ping hosts on the internet, but domain name resolution fails. I've tried all kinds of things (like adding the 8.8.8.8 server, or running Linux in a VM to see if it works fine in there) but somehow as soon as I am tethered, my Macbook Air can't resolve domain names anymore and using the internet is effectively useless. The other issue that I've had is that the system froze when I connected it via thunderbolt to a beamer. However, apart from that I'm getting longer battery life (from ~3 hours up to ~4.5 hours) and I like the OS. I guess bugs as the above are normal with OSX point releases. I still remember the pain when I ran Leopard.
- rsynnott 13y agoIt may be worth explicitly restricting the tether connection to IPv4 only; have seen similar things where an ISP has something that looks like a working IPv6 setup but isn't.
- ics 13y agoThose running Mavericks and experiencing significantly improved average battery life: what machines are you using and how old are they?
- aroch 13y ago2009, 13" MBP. Went from ~2.5 hours up to ~4hours
- selectodude 13y ago13" MacBook Pro retina. Probably get a solid and consistent extra hour. From 6 solid hours to 7. I can push to 9 now if I lower the brightness and don't browse the web.
- m_eiman 13y agoSame here. Really impressive.
- mathieuh 13y agoI'm not experiencing any real change in battery life on my specced out 15" retina. Got ~5 hours before 10.9, get ~5 hours on 10.9. Makes me kind of wish I'd gone for the base CPU and saved money and battery life.
- jonknee 13y agoIs there a difference in battery life? The CPUs all rate the same maximum wattage (it's the same chip after all!) and CPUs are pretty good about not using power when idle.
- Osmium 13y agoNot to mention that a faster clocked processor has to stay active for less time to achieve the same task. A similar logic explains why LTE battery life is often better than 3G/UMTS too.
- doe88 13y agoI don't know if it's related to their improvements on battery life but when my Mac mini goes to sleep it breaks my ssh sessions in my iTerm2 terminal it's annoying. I'm wondering if there is a way to maintain my connections alive?
- dewey 13y agoyou could use http://mosh.mit.edu/ http://mosh.mit.edu/
- rsynnott 13y agoIt may just be more aggressively sleeping, as opposed to just turning the screen off. You can change this in power management settings.
- mherkender 13y agoYou want OSX to keep network connections active while asleep? It seems to me that going to sleep means not actively doing anything. The most common solution to this problem is to use tmux or screen, or just disable sleep.
- apinstein 13y agoautossh is great, too if mosh doesn't fit your needs.
- FireBeyond 13y agoI wonder if iTerm2 could be patched to support the PowerNap functionality - and so send SSH keepalives whilst the system slept (assuming of course your underlying network substrate didn’t change).
- kalleboo 13y agoUsual caveats apply about making sure the software you depend on is compatible before updating. Notably, Adobe products are having a lot of issues (Photoshop: Save As is broken, keyboard shortcuts break if you have a non-US keyboard, and I've heard the Creative Cloud installer doesn't work at all).
- neya 13y agoThank you so much, we have Adobe suite running on our machines and I was tempted to upgrade! Thanks so much :)
- tksb 13y agoFor what it's worth, I've been running Adobe CC throughout the beta period (and currently on the GM) without issue.
- FireBeyond 13y agoCC installer - and Photoshop, Lightroom and Acrobat XI Pro - are all working without a hiccup on my 2013 rMBP and 10.9 beta 1 through GM.
- snowwrestler 13y agoBest resource for keeping up with these issues? I used to use Macintouch but I don't really trust that it gets all the user reports it used to.
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- ancarda 13y agoDoes anyone know when the public release (Mac App Store) will be available?
- matthew-wegner 13y agoThe next Apple press event is October 22nd. iPad-centric, but also expected to include Mac Pro pricing/availability, so probably Mavericks release as well...
- X-Istence 13y agoI hope to hear some news about updated MacBook Pro's as well!
- FireBeyond 13y agoI just hope for a Retina Cinema Display... but will settle for a Cinema Display with MagSafe 2, USB3... maybe a small res bump?
- yottabyte47 13y agoI expect it will be released on the 29th of this month given that last year Apple released Mountain Lion the day after their earnings call.
- jawngee 13y agoAnyone notice how slow the iOS simulator is when running apps on the 6.1 simulator?
- yapcguy 13y agoDoes anyone know if the memory swap issues[1], which plague Lion and Mountain Lion, have been fixed? [1] You could have 20GB of hard disk space free, but use XCode, Firefox and a few other apps, and soon you're down to 10MB and you get the dreaded "Your Mac is running out of disk space" dialog and you have to force quit all your apps, and type "purge" into a Terminal in a desperate attempt to get the swap released...
- plorkyeran 13y agoI'm at 53 MB used of 1 GB total swap after three days of uptime, while on 10.8 I would go far over that within minutes of startup (usually topping out at ~10 GB total after a day or two), so something does appear to have changed.
- Zr40 13y agoI run several virtual machines on my 8 GB MBP and I have never seen swap issues. Are you sure your problems are actually caused by swap? "purge" doesn't touch swap, it discards disk cache. Its use (according to the man page) is to simulate cold boot disk performance. The command has no use for memory management, because disk cache is automatically discarded when free memory runs out.
- yapcguy 13y agoFairly sure, I've been suffering with this on 10.7 and 10.8 on different machines. Some more info here: http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-deeply-broken-in-os-x-memory-management http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-de...
- __--__ 13y agoI second this. It's a big enough issue for me that if Mavericks doesn't fix it, I'll be switching back to Linux.
- georgebarnett 13y agoOn my previous '09 MBP with a 5400rpm drive disabling the pager meant it went from a really slow crappy experience to amazingly fast. I had periodic hangs when I used too much memory, but I would put up with those to have general performance not suck. I eventually bought a 2012 Air (got sick of carting a 17" laptop around) and so haven't seen any issues (yay for ssd!). Looking forward to seeing if this is fixed - I've always found page management decisions made by OSX to be less awesome than linux.
- rsynnott 13y agoDoes anyone happen to know whether Mavericks installs or can run Apple Java 6? For a variety of reasons, I don't want to go to 7 just yet (and Oracle doesn't ship a 6 JDK for MacOS).
- Alphasite_ 13y agoI believe it does.
- spullara 13y agoIt does. It auto installed when I ran IntelliJ.
- glhaynes 13y agoSame here: when I first launched Eclipse, it asked if I wanted to install JRE 6. Was kind of surprised it didn't ask if I wanted to install JRE 7, not sure why it's still set to 6.
- spartango 13y agoJRE 6 is the last JRE that Apple distributes itself via Software Update. JRE 7 comes direct from Oracle for the time being.
- jokoon 13y agocan't believe modern OSes can't run properly with 2GB of RAM. In the 90s we certainly didn't have the same standard.
- edude03 13y agoModern OSs do a lot in the background that OSs in the 90s did though. For example, indexing and scanning every file on your hard drive so I can find a document that contains a certain word or phrase in a few seconds.
- mwfunk 13y agoI totally agree with you but folks from the 80s said similar things about computing in the 90s. :) I can only imagine what the folks from the 70s would say. Like another poster said, it's not ALL bloat- there are lots of memory-hungry things going on in the background for user convenience that would have been unacceptable tradeoffs 10-20 years ago (in terms of how much system resources are consumed vs. the utility and convenience provided to the user), but on modern hardware those tradeoffs are less meaningful, and things that might have seemed wasteful 10 years ago become practical to do. I think a lot of it also from more and more graphics resources needed per app (high resolution images for UIs can consume an absurd amount of memory), as well as many apps being much more aggressive about caching stuff in memory for snappier response times (web browsers, or any kind of media-centric application). It seems inevitable that as memory gets cheaper, the average machine has more memory, and as the average memory of the average machine goes up, the perceived cost of memory consumption goes down, leading application (and OS) developers to figure out more and more ways to use all of that memory. It's a vicious circle (or a virtuous one, or both).
- jokoon 13y agoWell programmers should offer different version of their apps, or allow to disable those memory hungry features. And honestly I'm not really sure that a feature that is memory hungry is really useful anyways, especially at that scale. At that point I feel it's all about the planned obsolescence, they just make algorithms that require to buy more hardware. In that case software performance would only apply because of bigger hardware, not better programming. I'm sorry but with the computers of today, I really doubt programmers can invent resource hungry features that are really useful, maybe they can just do sloppy programming that requires more memory.
- spullara 13y agoThe Activity Monitor has been significantly enhanced and includes a page that tells you what software is using the most energy. That should help people get more battery life out of their systems as well.
- glhaynes 13y agoAnd put pressure on app developers not to be on that list without reason. glances with annoyance at the Twitter app
- idoescompooters 13y agoWhat is the difference between the GM version and the App store released one?
- sigzero 13y agoThey should be exactly the same barring any showstopper bugs that get uncovered in the GM.
- msoad 13y agoYou have to fresh install developer releases while you can just upgrade to public release.
- idoescompooters 13y agoOh, wow. I just did a clean install of Mountain Lion on my early 2011 MacBook Pro to "freshen" up.
- k-mcgrady 13y agoWhen I upgraded Windows machines I always went with a complete fresh install. Since switching to MAc I've always just run the upgrade. What do people on HN recommend? Using this technique to do a complete reinstall, or upgrading?
- spartango 13y agoUpgrading generally works great with OS X; generally the upgrade process blows away the system/OS files and leaves your stuff untouched. In the normal case, "your stuff" is well compartmentalized away from system files so stuff works nicely. With that said, as a developer sometimes it can be handy to do a clean install. For example, if you have any custom kernel modules, these will certainly be blown away in an upgrade. Additionally, developer tools installed in /usr/ can be interfered with, and in general the probability that something will be incompatible/broken is a bit higher.
- teilo 13y agoI'm currently running a system that started with 10.7, upgraded to 10.8, then the 10.9 betas, and finally 10.9 GM. I've had no issues.
- johnchristopher 13y agoI seem to remember a story some OSX version ago about a user who lost her RSS feeds in mail though. There were still there somewhere hidden in her home settings but there were no more accessible through Mail because the features was removed. So be careful anyway.
- protomyth 13y agoI was fine with just upgrading except for Lion -> Mountain Lion. A lot of little nitpicks were fixed after I did a clean install.
- marban 13y agoI've read posts from folks who started at 10.1 and upgraded all the way to 10.8 without any issues.
- kevinxucs 13y agoWow, such a one-week-late news.
- nailer 13y agoThis article is unnecessary for most users. Open the .dmg, drag the install .app into /Applications and run it from there. The upgrade works fine.