Update Mac OS X 10.6 to Mac OS X 10.7 alias Lion

Yesterday Mac OS X Lion was released and after I made a backup of my machine I started the install process to upgrade to Lion.

Where can you download Lion? The only way up to now is to buy it in the Apple Appstore. I wrote a tutorial based on a post I found in the internet how to burn a install DVD from the downloaded file here.

The install process takes around 30 minutes on my old Mac Book Pro. Before I started the upgrade process I tried to update all of my installed software to a Lion compatible version. For example Little Snitch need to be updated to version 2.40. The most of my installed software delivered updates the last weeks and months to be Lion compatible.

If you are doing a lot of music stuff with your mac you should wait some time with the update. Many of the well known products are not Lion ready at the moment.

The most important applications I am using are Mail, Adium, Firefox, iTerm, SubEthaEdit, 1Password and some Java based Applications like Eclipse and Netbeans.

After the first restart and login spotlight is indexing the hard disk which slows down the performance a little bit. To be sure everything works fine I started Mail and this takes some time because it updates the mailstore. In my case this takes around 3 minutes. Time to check how I can install java. In Lion java is not included anymore. But this is not a problem. I started terminal and tried what happens if i run java -version and in the next moment Lion asked me to download and install java.

Firefox, Adium, iTerm, 1Password and SubEthaEdit work perfectly. The spotlight indexing process toke around 45 minutes.

For me the update process worked like a charm. Check if all your applications are compatible and make a backup. Then you can enjoy the new features of Apples newest operating system.