OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)

I generally don't rush in to things. I'm not an "early adopter", instead preferring to let others debug new products and software. They can be vendors' unpaid Quality Assurance if they want. After the flames have been put out and an update or two released to fix early problems, I'll have a look. I use my computer to make a living, so I suppose I'm cautious by nature.

Apple released the newest version of the Mac OS, "Mountain Lion", OS X version 10.8, several months ago. I had been using version 10.6.n since 2009; that is now two versions old. I was happy with that; it was stable, it was still receiving important updates (security patches, mostly, which, despite all the blather to the contrary, are needed on the Mac, too), and since I'd been using it for some time, it rarely presented any surprises.

Apple advertises support only for the current version of OS X, and one generation back, although they seem to be somewhat flexible with that "one generation" bit. In any case, when 10.8 was released in July (2012) I decided to upgrade. I've had a very busy year, especially spring and summer, so I'm only now getting around to installing Mountain Lion.

My Mac Pro has four bays for hard drives. I've long had three of those populated. For the new OS I installed a small HD, downloaded the OS from Apple, created a boot install drive, and then performed the installation. Quite straightforward, no issues worth mentioning. Of course, doing a clean install of an OS is the easy part, just the beginning of a somewhat longer process.

The first order of business was to upgrade my monitor profiling software, Coloreyes Display Pro, to the current version, which fixes a problem with the installer so it'll work properly with Mountain Lion. According to ICC, CED Pro 1.6 includes some minor feature enhancements and improves their LUT loader's interaction with DDC. I can attest this does seem to be the case. The software upgrade was USD $49.00.

I like to make bootable clones of the OS at intervals as I build up a new boot drive, just as a bit of insurance if something goes wrong installing or setting up new software. The version of Carbon Copy Cloner I've used for some time is not compatible with Mountain Lion. Another $45.00 hit on the checkbook fixed that.

I then downloaded the upgrade to Photoshop CS6 (from CS5). CS6 was released early this year; as I said, I'm not an early adopter! Another $200.00 spent. I was able to copy from my older boot drive most of the setting and preference files from CS5, making it simple to set up Photoshop, Bridge, and ACR in CS6 to have my familiar, customized workspaces. A few more software installations had my new, clean boot drive ready for prime time.

Among those, of course: the latest driver for the 7900. As mentioned in a posting here back in October, this is version 9.04, released in September. Installing new drivers over previous versions maintains the old version number; this is inconsistently exposed (see the October posting linked above) to the user. This is NOT the case with a clean install:

There's no ambiguity about which driver version is installed. I installed the driver, and then allowed Bonjour, Apple's device-finding technology (it's quite a lot more than that, in fact) to locate the printer and complete the setup. This took seconds. (I should mention that my printer is on our wired network).

So far I'm a happy camper, although I'm now about $300 poorer. To be fair, the Photoshop upgrade was not necessary, as CS5 is supposed to be fully compatible with Mountain Lion.

I haven't made a print in some time, so I've not yet used the new driver, nor PS CS6 to make a print. That'll change within the next week, as I've a couple of prints to make for a small commission. I don't expect any issues, but if the worst happens and I'm unable to print, I can simply boot from the old drive, with OS X 10.6.8 and PS CS5, to get the job done.

  --Jay