OSX 10.7 "Lion" seeded to developers

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Apple has seeded a release candidate (although there will be changes) to members of Apple Developer Connection. There is also news from Apple on what will be included in the new release.

The most exciting news I found there is of interest to users of MacOS on Intel for music serving. Apparently "Lion" will include the ability to install as either a desktop OS ... like current OSX "Snow Leopard" or as a Server OS ... like the current OSX "Snow Leopard Server".

I run Snow Leopard Server on the Mini Server that Apple has been selling for a while, and attached to a Firewire external disk I keep all the iTunes music files which can be used by any computer on the local network (over gigabit ethernet).

I also have the Mini Server directly attached to the hifi. So, instead of playing the iTunes library locally on a machine, I can also (and usually do) control the server with Screen Sharing to play music on the main system.

There are quite a few other enhancements to "Lion" that I'm sure are of interest to Mac users, but I thought I would give a heads-up to members here of these particular features since it's interesting from a music standpoint.

It might also be worth mentioning that administering a server is not a trivial task, and may be beyond what many people would attempt. Still, this is (or perhaps 'probably is') a massive reduction in cost for the Server software, which was already low by industry standards, over existing versions.
 
Not interested. No longer supports Rossetta and I can't afford to upgrade all my SW.

Well, you could re-partition and dual-boot via the Option key to choose one or the other, since non-destructive partitioning is available in OSX. Your non-Rosetta apps will run in either and you could launch from the Applications directory on the other partition. Having said that I'm not normally an early adopter of OSX versions myself, and have been known to skip one or two depending on what it offers me in features. Usually not much, occasionally something I can really use. I think 10.4 is a pretty decent OS and could happily live with it if I had to.

For me, I think the big news with Lion is the ability to choose a Server version on install of the standard consumer package. It wasn't that long ago that OSX Server cost either $1000 (unlimited) or $500 (10-client), which even at those prices is vastly cheaper than Windows Server 2008. With Snow Leopard Server the price fell to $500 and it's unlimited client. At [some price suitable for consumer OSX 10.7 retail boxes] it's a steal.

Since it can serve Windows clients just as easily as Mac clients, I could see Wintel users choosing to run it ... it's half the price of Windows Server alone (no hardware) for a Mini and 10.7 plus Microsoft charges on a per-client basis (base price is $1029 and you can serve 5 users; there are also versions for $1209 10 users; $3999 25 users; you can also add users at $199 per additional 5 users, $799 per additional 20 users, etc).

I run Snow Leopard Server now, so it's not critical to me, but I think for those interested in running a music server this is big news, although configuring a Server is hardly trivial. Still, if the Server holds your data files, including iTunes and multimedia, and manages backups, you can have a pretty empty HD on your client machines, negating the need to upgrade the HD much, if at all. In this context, an 80GB HD is huge on a client machine.
 
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frugal-phile™
Joined 2001
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I'm gonna have to get some Intel Macs. The old PPCs just keep chugging. What i'd really like to see is a solid verion of SheepShaver that would lt me run both OS 9.2.2 and 7.6.1 (then i could run a decent spreadsheet again -- amaing that even 20_ years dead, Trapeze still runs circles around Excel)

dave
 
I had tried Sheepshaver previously and had no luck. However I recently did an install on my MacBook Pro 2.8 dual core and it worked fine, so I say give it another try. I think you're limited to System9 though.

I might be able to dig up some links that were helpful to me, PM if interested.

I still love PPC Macs and I think it's sad that Motorola wasn't able to keep their act together long enough to keep the desktop and (especially) laptop versions in the pipeline; Freescale (the chip division of Motorola) is doing just fine under new management and share structure. IBM was only interested in server applications. I probably will never sell my 867 G4 desktop (it's not worth much to anyone else but it sure rocks when you need it to).

I also would have to very much agree regarding spreadsheets and, perhaps even moreso, word processor apps. What was available 15+ years ago is in many ways superior to the bloatware we have now ... it's sad, really, that those classes of apps have degraded, not improved, during a time when computing underwent a revolution.

Every once in a while, just for a reality check, I fire up a Powerbook 180c I have laying around (with a whopping 2.5MB or RAM), and run Word or Photoshop. Yet some phone companies can't even get the address book to work right with a two thousand times faster processor and a thousand times that much memory. Ken Olsen (Digital Equipment Corporation) is infamously famous for his "640 k ought to be enough for anybody" but while everyone is mocking him, they miss the sad truth that lies within.
 
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