OS X Mavericks App Store link | Hacker News Reader

OS X Mavericks App Store link

itunes.apple.com

109 pointszacharytamas83 comments

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

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 ?

I'm not sure yet. For 10.9 the installer put all the necessary files in, and didn't download anything over the air for me.

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.

Copying that file to an external and burning a DL DVD backup of that image were the first steps that I took after finishing the download.

Check the Mac Rumors forums before doing this. I heard that this approach doesn't work anymore because Apple changed some dependencies.

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.

  sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/USBSTICK --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app --nointeraction

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.

What happens when you do that without the --nointeraction flag? Presumably, it explains what it's going to do, and prompts for elevation?

Was the previous comment edited? There's no --nointeraction flag there.

There is, you need to scroll horizontally- there's no text wrapping on <pre> lines.

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.

http://bugreport.apple.com

You do need to sign up for a free developer account to use it.

Thank you. I am filling out the report there now.

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.

Yeah, I was wondering that as well.

I did it on a 2007 MacBook Pro and I was forced to re-enter my normal account credentials, at which point the installer started up.

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.

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).

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])

Looks like you are right! Didn't expect it to have an up to date version of Ruby.

http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/54109839209/psa-do-not-use...

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.

Check out rbenv https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv

I've been using rbenv. I didn't realize it could install gems without using sudo when the system Ruby is activated. Thanks!

rvm and its gemsets.

pythonbrew is actually the python equivalent of rvm - https://github.com/utahta/pythonbrew

Has anybody had any issues with homebrew, virtualenv, or prezto (zsh) after a Mavericks install?

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

I fixed it by doing:

easy_install --upgrade pip

sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper

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.

No issues with homebrew. I did have to accept XCode license, as I recently upgraded, but that's unrelated to Mavericks.

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 don't usually use sudo to install virtualenv, you can use the method here and it will work: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4324558/

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.

Mongodb and CasperJS were broken for Mavericks comes with libc++ instead of libstdc++ by default. A little hack could fix these two.

Apparently it's not the same build as the golden master. Agh!

There were two gold master candidates. 13A598 and 13A603.

What build number is it?

The version that I just installed from the app store is 13A603.

Awesome, that's the same one that was released as GM a few days ago (the second GM seed). The first GM seed was 13A598.

I'm running 13A598 and don't see any software updates available. Anyone have any info on this? Should I download manually?

Sadly you need to re download the whole thing. Just skip the warning that you already running 10.9 and download then install it again.

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.

If you try and run `make` in Terminal it will prompt you to install the command line tools.

Command line tools are removed from xcodes' downloads. But they can be installed with

    xcode-select --install

gcc is missing ...

  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!

---

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.

Does anyone know how installing Mavericks affects hard drive space? I'm running on an 128GB SSD and space is always at a premium for me.

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.

The install is ~8GB

Really? For a fully functional install? Gotta wonder what the rest of that is doing there on my drive...

I got back about 14GB of disk space after upgrading.

Same here with HD space being at a premium.

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?

Maybe it's caused due FileVault disk encryption. Try disabling the encryption before applying the update.

Nope, not using FileVault.

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.

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.

The firmware update gave me a success message after I had installed it, and I don't see it available again in the updates. So no luck there.

FWIW - I rebooted it on my own after the first dialogue saying that it had installed. Then it was there again in software updates.

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?

Is there any direct link to download this update? 5.29GB is pretty big. Would love to download it through my download manager.

Exactly.

Me asking similar question - https://twitter.com/stefek99/status/392755432105603072 - I want to find .iso, make bootable USB and wipe everything, start fresh.

Nowhere close to official, but you can torrent it: http://thepiratebay.sx/torrent/9085330/OS_X_Mavericks_10.9_O...

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.

YOu can pause and resume download through appstore.

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.

It seems to be working now.

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.

Update: It did not in fact work. It turns out that my SATA cable happened to die. I replaced it myself for about $25 on Amazon.

I'm happy to report that the install was pretty effortless. Even with my unusual File Vault (encrypted HFS+) & Bootcamp setup.

So, should we be downloading this or not?

Anyone know how big the download is?

5.3GB

Thank you!

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?

Can I download this once and then copy it to my other machines or do I have to download this individually on every one?

You can create a usb key installer and use it to install everywhere

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

http://povolotski.me/2013/10/12/osx-mavericks-gm-out-bootabl...

lol, torrenting free app from piratebay. Downloading it now

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!

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