Jul 15 2012
OS X Mountain Lion Golden Master, pt. 4
Finally. The Mac is re-installed with Mountain Lion and all my major applications are restored. Even the Steam games are back on the Mac. Only BlitzMax and some other developer tools are yet missing, but that’s not a big issue. At least the functionality of the system has been restored.
So far, the only loss is the Cybort RAT 7 — when it’s plugged in, it makes Mountain Lion behave weird. The latest Mac software for the Contagion was 1.1.42, and it doesn’t help with Mountain Lion. I found a link on their website that pointed to a 1.1.43 software version, but either that link was a typo or the software was not on their server yet. Anyway, I’ll sit the Cyborg situation out for now. HP also do not have Mountain Lion compatible software on their servers, but Apple ships a working driver with ML. Other than that, most stuff seems to work just fine with ML – even Microsoft Office 2008 and Adobe Photoshop CS3 (although the CS3 applications can no longer establish a connection with Adobe’s update servers).
The system feels good enough. After all those updates, I’m no longer sure if it’s actually any faster than Lion or more stable. Or slower and less stable. At least the Mac works and is still being supported for a few more months – until the gods in Cupertino in their infinite wisdom decide to drop the support for Late 2009 iMacs in the next incarnation of their operating system. Well, at least for my machine that time has not come yet. And when it comes, I’ll probably not be in the mood to shove more money down Cupertino’s throat. But I will cross that bridge when I get there. For now, Mountain Lion is a go and seems to be a good enough update to stay in Apple land for a bit longer.
[UPDATE]
An update regarding Gatekeeper: I was advised that there seems to be a mechanism built in to “authorize” specific apps or add exceptions for certain apps. You have to disable Gatekeeper, launch and execute the application and once that is done, you can re-enable Gatekeeper and henceforth it will always run that application even though it is unsigned and coming from an unknown source. Not necessarily a beautiful and intuitive solution – I would have preferred a dialog in the style of the “login items” dialog window – but it seems to do the trick. Or so I’ve been told, because I actually haven’t tried it myself yet.
One Response to “OS X Mountain Lion Golden Master, pt. 4”
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I myself am in a situation, that my 5-year-old Macintosh-Computer (MacBook Pro mid 2007), which has been running fine since day one, will face discontinuation upon the next release after ML.
I am already experiencing horrible hardware-compatibility-issues, which I reported to the Apple-Bug-Tracing-System, but with no reply ever since. Seemingly, this reporter is just a black hole.
I have now made the decision to buy a 2012 Mac mini and put an SSD, more RAM and Linux (Debian Testing) in/on it (with a small backup-OS X to make firmware-updates possible). The reason for choosing a Macintosh after so much pain is less the software they put on it, but more the compactness and reliability of the hardware.
The direction Mac OS X (or OS X, how they call it recently) is heading to seems to be clear and you already pointed some of it out in your article: Full dependency on the proprietary AppStore-System, more visual effects, more iOS, less customizability and less freedom for developers.
Everyone can make a choice on his freedom when it comes to computers, but unfortunately, freedom in software mostly coincides with having to learn way more about computers than the average consumer would like to. The average consumer would rather use iCloud to store his documents in the Cloud (until this service is discontinued like MobileMe), use social networks wasting their time to stay in touch with mostly false friends and use the AppStore to browse Software, which is equal to or even lacking features in comparison to OpenSource Software.
Quo vadis, beautiful world?