As always, you can make yourself a dandy boot disk or USB drive by opening the installer's app bundle, and writing the following file to your favourite medium using the "restore" tab in Disk Utility.
/Install OS X Mavericks.app/Contents/SharedSupport/InstallESD.dmg
I think you might be correct. Apple used to distribute the Lion Recovery app, which basically copied the InstallESD.dmg to a USB stick, but it no longer works with Mountain Lion. Running this command, however, uses a hidden executable inside the installer application to write itself to a USB stick.
NOTE: This uses sudo because it needs permission to write to the device. It also has the potential of destroying external drives, internal drives and boot drives. Please change the value for the 'volume' flag to point to the mounted path of the USB stick or SD card you wish to use as the bootable install disk. It will overwrite all the data on that disk. I am not responsible for any data loss using this command. Please double check all paths, all commands and all flags before running this.
When you install/update the system it creates/update your restore partition. Does Apple still only put necessary file and then do an over the air installation or they put the whole system ready to install ?
When installing from one of the upgrade-apps or their bootable USB counterparts it installs the whole thing from the disk, nothing downloaded. The download step is basically just for reinstalling w/o an installer.
Does anyone know if Apple has a general bug report mechanism for the public?
The Mavericks installer was not accepting the password to unlock FileVault in the installer itself after reboot. It turns out that the password prompt is in QWERTY despite the language input icon indicating that it was in Dvorak. That is a profoundly annoying bug.
So I'm doing the upgrade on an mbp with filevault2. The installer "reboots" the machine and goes into the rest of the installation. But I'm never prompted for a disk password. So... how'd that happen?
It's possible to do a warm reboot into a new kernel without ever powering down and re-initializing RAM.
Also, it may not even be fully rebooting, but instead doing something like killing all processes except init (launchd) which then starts up the installer. I haven't run it, so I don't know exactly what it's doing, but there are several ways to "reboot" without fully rebooting.
You may not have noticed it, but it prompted you for your password as part of the installation wizard. I assume that after that, it saved your password where the boot program could find it. Other full-disk encryption programs have similar capabilities, where they'll automatically unlock an encrypted volume if so configured. This is totally insecure, of course, but in the context of the Mavericks upgrade, it's temporary so I guess that's OK.
The interesting question is this: How well did Apple sanitize whatever bit of disk or flash memory ended up storing the key through the two reboots Mavericks needed to do to complete the upgrade?
Oh, I did notice. The same prompt you get when installing any software. However, my user/password and the disk decrypt password are different passwords, no?
Just finished installing this. Upgrade took about 35 minutes total on my macbook air (2011). Was able to run a local Rails 4 app connecting to MySQL with no problems after the upgrade. Trying to install ruby 2.0-p247 now and all the gems and see what happens.
Isn't 2.0.0-p247 the system ruby? My rvm install was p195; after running "rvm use system" it's now p247 (ruby 2.0.0p247 (2013-06-27 revision 41674) [universal.x86_64-darwin13])
Is there nothing equivalent to virtualenv for Ruby? It'd be nice to be able to use the system Ruby and just get gem to install into an isolated project specific location.
All worked fine. ruby 2.0-p247 compiled and install fine using rvm. Postgres backed Rails app worked too (using homebrew installed versions of postgres/mysql).
Homebrew seems to be working fine as I just did a brew update without any problems. I was getting virtualenvwrapper errors upon opening a new terminal because that was gone from /Library/Python
Homebrew is giving me warnings about XCode 5.0 being out of date, but the developer site isn't specifying 5.0.1 as Homebrew is asking for and I don't have an available update in the App Store.
I had some trouble reloading an existing vagrant box and virtualbox, seems to have resolved itself after using each providers uninstall tool bundled with the latest versions of Vagrant and Vbox and installing fresh versions after.
I've been running the betas and using homebrew since they were released. No problems after the first few months. You need the new XCode/dev tools for it to work, which are in the app store.
First hitch I've noticed with 10.9: "gdb" seems to be missing. Gcc is still there. I've looked around to see if there's another optional download that I'm missing (like a Command Line Tools for Mavericks), but I don't see one.
Looks like Xcode is using lldb for debugging, and I can use lldb on the command line. I guess lldb is now the standard 1st-party debugger? Guess I will be figuring out how to install gdb manually..
You are correct, gdb is phased out in favor of lldb. It's just the end of a very long transitional period, similar to the clang vs. gcc situation. Introduce the successor, support both for several releases, then finally drop the legacy component. You can still install gdb yourself of course.
Protip: While old Apple builds of gcc will still work on Mavericks, newer FSF gdb won't load any shared libraries. To fix it, just change DYLD_VERSION_MAX in gdb/solib-darwin.c from 12 to 14.
xistence$ gcc --version
Configured with: --prefix=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.2.1
Apple LLVM version 5.0 (clang-500.2.79) (based on LLVM 3.3svn)
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin13.0.0
Thread model: posix
Command line tools for Mavericks are a separate download, it is no longer available in the Xcode downloads section. Start Xcode, click Xcode in the top left next the Apple in the menu bar, select "Open Developer Tool", click "More Developer Tools" to go directly to the site, log in with your apple developer ID and download the command line tools.
The command line tools also make sure to install a whole range of standard headers that are not included with Xcode so that you can build curses based apps and all that fun stuff!
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With gcc missing, so is libstdc++ for linking/compiling against.
fwiw you can also search for it in the app store and it appears. Or go to the "updates" tab, it's visible in there for me: https://www.dropbox.com/s/f921jp7mjcimfac/Screenshot%202013-... (possibly because I already clicked "free upgrade" in the search result? not sure.)
This doesn't appear(?) to be an unintentional early leak or anything. I'm installing it on a secondary partition, happy to report if it explodes :)
edit: so far so good. I like what I'm seeing for the most part, took very close to 30 minutes from "click install" to "booted into 10.9" on my non-stock SSD. I'm not claiming any responsibility for other people's problems, but it seems to work from here, I'd say go for it if you're feeling adventurous.
edit: have to re-install Java, XCode wants to reinstall a few things, re-enable accessibility (shortcat/dterm), all in all similar to a new install. so far all apps work fine.
My MBP has a 128G SSD system drive as well (+ a big HDD for the data) and I got over 50G free, that's including some pretty big things (=25GB) in the Applications folder. /Library and /System folders come in at about 14GB together, I'd say a fresh Mavericks install should be around 30GB total.
For anyone not yet using a hard drive analysis tool for discovering what's taking up all that space, DaisyDisk has served me well. For analysing Time Machine backups, BackupLoupe works well for identifying backup bloaters.
I'm getting the error "Before installing OS X Mavericks, this system requires MacBook Air Flash Storage Firmware Update 1.1. Click on the Updates button in the Mac App Store to install the update." even though I've applied the firmware update and there aren't any updates (besides Mavericks) in the Mac App Store. Any help?
Lots of people have reported having to install that thing more than once.
When you installed it, after reboot, did you absolutely get a window saying it was successful? (for me, the window took 45-60 seconds to pop up, and it failed twice before it worked (didn't want to install on battery)).
Try reloading the updates section of the Mac App Store again, and again.
Happened to me, too. With the exception I have FileVault enabled. Contacted Apple Support and looking forward to resolve this issue. Otherwise I'm stuck with Mountain Lion. Can anybody confirm this has something to do with FileVault, actually?
It happened to me too. Apple -> Software update and the patch was still there. So I installed it again. Great success; now waiting on the Maverick download.
I have always wondered why Apple and Microsoft don't embrace Bittorrent as a perfectly reasonable distribution method for "big bang" releases (like today). I have tried using Burnbit but it is only as valuable as there are folks who use it (Metcalfe's Law strikes again!).
I would also want to see some shas of the files distributed from Apple before I would use something from TPB.
I believe that when you buy things from the Microsoft Store, one fulfilment option is an Akamai "peer download", which uses BitTorrent internally. This was something I used a few years ago, so I'm not sure if it's changed since then.
Not only would it be a better experience for the customers, it would save them a ton of bandwidth as well. I have no idea why App Store doesn't use BT by default and fall back to direct downloading.
I ran into an issue while installing. It said "An error occurred while installing OS X" and then froze. Afterwards, I got a bouncing question mark. Booting into internet recovery several times, and it couldn't find my HDD.
I finally assumed that it had probably fried my HDD somehow, so I powered off and ordered an SSD online since I was looking to upgrade anyway. I unplugged it from the wall and turned it on and it suddenly found the Mavericks installer again.
I didn't have this problem, but removing external monitors during the install screwed up the installers view, I could tell it was still running, but not refreshing. Eventually it finished and view started working again.
Apple wants to try to convince me that I should save my passwords in the cloud - and that Apple doesn't have access to them? Has no one in Cupertino heard of Edward Snowden?
yes, once you download it, you can copy over the .app installer on a USB disk and use it to install on your other machines. You can also make a bootable USB installer from the .app
I'm glad to see this link submitted here. I was going to use the standard process to upgrade my OS, but I thought that this time I'd check HN first. Turns out my gamble paid off. Thanks, OP!
