OS X Mavericks GM is out – how to make a bootable installation USB

OS X Mavericks GM is out – how to make a bootable installation USB(povolotski.me)

56 points by dannypovolotski 12 years ago | 100 comments

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.

yapcguy 12 years ago |

Does 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 12 years ago | |

I'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 12 years ago | |

I 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 12 years ago | | |

Fairly 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-de...

mwfunk 12 years ago | |

This sounds more like an issue with an app (or a kext) consuming way too much memory than any innate OS-level issue with paging. Activity Monitor and/or top can be useful in figuring out what the heck is using up all that memory. Xcode can use a really surprising amount of memory sometimes but it's not going to just gobble up 20GB of pageable VM.

Bvalmont 12 years ago |

Been 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 12 years ago | |

I 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 12 years ago | | |

You 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 12 years ago | |

If 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/, 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.

selectodude 12 years ago | |

Apple increased the available video memory on the retina machines from 768MB to 1GB. The difference is profound. I was concerned about being stuck with nothing but an HD4000 but I'm very content with everything now.

tuananh 12 years ago | |

you get only 2.5 hours on MBP Retina !?!?

terhechte 12 years ago | | |

Maybe he's using Xcode

jevinskie 12 years ago | | |

Who knows how many charge cycles it has been through.

Keyframe 12 years ago | | |

After Effects

kalleboo 12 years ago |

Usual 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 12 years ago | |

Thank you so much, we have Adobe suite running on our machines and I was tempted to upgrade! Thanks so much :)

tksb 12 years ago | | |

For what it's worth, I've been running Adobe CC throughout the beta period (and currently on the GM) without issue.

FireBeyond 12 years ago | | |

CC 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 12 years ago | |

Best 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.

aroch 12 years ago | | |

Probably this once Mav lands for the public: http://roaringapps.com/apps:table

E: Oh, looks like it's already there in waiting: http://new.roaringapps.com/

grey-area 12 years ago | |

Has anyone tried Adobe CS5.5? Any problems?

spullara 12 years ago |

The 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 12 years ago | |

And put pressure on app developers not to be on that list without reason. glances with annoyance at the Twitter app

k-mcgrady 12 years ago |

When 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 12 years ago | |

Upgrading 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.

johnchristopher 12 years ago | | |

I 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.

teilo 12 years ago | | |

I'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.

marban 12 years ago | |

I've read posts from folks who started at 10.1 and upgraded all the way to 10.8 without any issues.

spartango 12 years ago | | |

Unfortunately, this is not possible; 10.4 was the first release of OSX that supported Intel, and 10.5 was the last to support PowerPC. Alas, you can't have a machine that was on 10.1 that can also run 10.8..

That said, you can definitely chain update your way from 10.4 to 10.8 without issue, and similarly from 10.1 to 10.5. The latter case is a little tricky as many of the machines that ran 10.1 were not deemed fit for 10.5 (e.g. the G4 Cube variants), but there are workarounds.

protomyth 12 years ago | |

I was fine with just upgrading except for Lion -> Mountain Lion. A lot of little nitpicks were fixed after I did a clean install.

ics 12 years ago |

Those running Mavericks and experiencing significantly improved average battery life: what machines are you using and how old are they?

mathieuh 12 years ago | |

I'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 12 years ago | | |

Is 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.

rsynnott 12 years ago | | |

May be worth running this: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-power-gadget-... and seeing if any software you use is pegging it to maximum unnecessarily. I find that Microsoft Silverlight on MacOS tends to do that; Flash also does occasionally, though not always.

selectodude 12 years ago | |

13" 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 12 years ago | | |

Same here. Really impressive.

aroch 12 years ago | |

2009, 13" MBP. Went from ~2.5 hours up to ~4hours

rdrake 12 years ago | |

I'm not noticing much of an improvement on my mid-2011 MacBook Air (< 6 month old battery, 145 cycle count). The fact that the battery life indicator shows applications that are using significant amounts of energy has made me more aware of which applications are sucking away my battery life, however.

glhaynes 12 years ago | |

I haven't run mine on battery much since upgrading; but as you might expect I feel like my fans run less, which is much appreciated. MacBook Air 11", Mid 2012.

samsnelling 12 years ago | |

2013 13" MBA (with i5). I'm getting more or less the same. 7-9 hours under normal usage. Up to 10-11 under very light load.

jawngee 12 years ago | |

2012 Retina MacBook Pro. An extra hour.

terhechte 12 years ago | |

2012 Macbook Air 11"

Alphasite_ 12 years ago | |

Last year i7 MBA went from ~2.5h -> ~3.5-4.5h

rsynnott 12 years ago |

Does 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).

spullara 12 years ago | |

It does. It auto installed when I ran IntelliJ.

glhaynes 12 years ago | | |

Same 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.

Alphasite_ 12 years ago | |

I believe it does.

doe88 12 years ago |

I 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?

mherkender 12 years ago | |

You 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.

dewey 12 years ago | |

you could use http://mosh.mit.edu/

rsynnott 12 years ago | |

It may just be more aggressively sleeping, as opposed to just turning the screen off. You can change this in power management settings.

FireBeyond 12 years ago | |

I 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).

apinstein 12 years ago | |

autossh is great, too if mosh doesn't fit your needs.

ancarda 12 years ago |

Does anyone know when the public release (Mac App Store) will be available?

matthew-wegner 12 years ago | |

The 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 12 years ago | | |

I hope to hear some news about updated MacBook Pro's as well!

FireBeyond 12 years ago | | |

I just hope for a Retina Cinema Display... but will settle for a Cinema Display with MagSafe 2, USB3... maybe a small res bump?

yottabyte47 12 years ago | |

I 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.

casperc 12 years ago |

I'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 12 years ago | |

I'd suspect it is limited to Cocoa stuff, so GUI only. It should be controllable via a setting anyway.

terhechte 12 years ago |

I'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 12 years ago | |

It 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.

nailer 12 years ago |

This article is unnecessary for most users.

Open the .dmg, drag the install .app into /Applications and run it from there. The upgrade works fine.

idoescompooters 12 years ago |

What is the difference between the GM version and the App store released one?

sigzero 12 years ago | |

They should be exactly the same barring any showstopper bugs that get uncovered in the GM.

msoad 12 years ago | |

You have to fresh install developer releases while you can just upgrade to public release.

idoescompooters 12 years ago | | |

Oh, wow. I just did a clean install of Mountain Lion on my early 2011 MacBook Pro to "freshen" up.

jokoon 12 years ago |

can't believe modern OSes can't run properly with 2GB of RAM. In the 90s we certainly didn't have the same standard.

mwfunk 12 years ago | |

I 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 12 years ago | | |

Well 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.

edude03 12 years ago | |

Modern 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.

joezydeco 12 years ago |

Can 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.

luismarques 12 years ago | |

Actually, 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 12 years ago | | |

I'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.

micro-ram 12 years ago | |

Mavericks 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 12 years ago | | |

I 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.

eunice 12 years ago | |

On a mid-2010 iMac with 4GB I find it snappier than 10.8

bluedino 12 years ago | |

Have you thought about adding an SSD?

joezydeco 12 years ago | | |

I have, but on a 2008 it's a major surgery.

jawngee 12 years ago |

Anyone notice how slow the iOS simulator is when running apps on the 6.1 simulator?

kevinxucs 12 years ago |

Wow, such a one-week-late news.