Mac OS X Lion

Today, Apple shipped MacOS X Lion via the Mac AppStore. It sells for $29.99 USD, and it is topping the charts at the store.
This is the first time Apple went with a complete Internet-based approach to dealing with an OS upgrade. In fact, it’s the only time I have ever heard of an OS being sold strictly via digital download. Words on the street seem to suggest that if you go to an Apple retail store, they will install Lion for you through a local cached version of the OS. Thus, saving you the hassle of downloading 3.5GB over the net. It’s not really a life saver if you ask me, but it’s interesting to see how Apple is handling things for now, and the days to come.

My initial impression of Lion was fairly positive, but not overly impressed with the changes.

Pros:

1. No major compatibility issues with applications. Everything minus a few utility apps works fine on Lion out of the box, or requires a quick downloadable update. I’m guessing since most apps these days were written in Cocoa already, it wasn’t much of an hassle to fix the few kinks in Lion.
2. New Mail app is great! New UI with an option to switch back to the classic view if you want to.
3. System icons are mono-toned. This may be my personal preference, but I think colours can sometimes look a bit messy and disorganized.
4. System pop-ups, and transitions are super fast and smooth. Apple really took everything they learned from making efficient 2D effects on iOS to the desktop.
5. iTunes was rewritten for Lion in 64-bit! This is not really a Lion feature, but it sure has been a long wait.
6. New features – Air Drop, Versions, Resume , Full Screen, FaceTime etc.
7. No notable increase in disk space usage. It didn’t bloat unlike many Windows Service Pack updates.

Cons:

1. 

   No support for legacy authentication method in SMB or AFP

   Major compatibility issues with accessing Samba and AFP shares! This was certainly bad news for us who are using my FreeNAS build guide and are accessing files through either SMB or AFP. Apple decided that the authentication method – DHCAST128 was insufficient and they disabled support for it in Lion! This will break compatibility with all over-the-counter NAS boxes, including our DIY NAS. However, there are remedies that you can follow to work around it. Check out my later post.

2. Time Machine does not work over non-Apple network shares! This is a huge deal for people who use a thirdparty NAS box to host Time Machine backups. Unless your box can support the latest AFP stack in Lion, Time Machine will NOT work! You can put a sparsebundle on it… but it simply will not work. Time Machine only works through the latest AFP stack.
3. New features.
• Air Drop is Lion-only. There is no Air Drop app for previous versions of Mac OS.
• Versions is only an API that apps can be written on. It is not a system wide feature, and it is up to the developer to implement.
• Resume can be really annoying if you are using Safari and don’t want your web page views saved all the time! The setting to turn it off is also very hidden. You have to go to System Preferences -> General -> uncheck Restore Windows when quitting and re-opening apps.
• Full Screen is also app specific and requires the developer to provide support. Don’t know why they could just implement it some other way to resize the window to full screen.
4. Mail database took a good 15min. It was surprisingly slow! Maybe I had too much stuff in there.
5. No Java runtime in the OS. But the OS is smart enough to automatically download it when you need it, through Software Updates.
6. 

   Multi-touch gestures in Lion

   Super weird scrolling and gesture changes! The scrolling direction by default in Lion is the complete opposite of what you are used to. Apple call this the “natural” direction. But it’s really not so nature to me – natural is what I am used to. Don’t fancy me Apple. Thankfully, you can change this through System Preferences -> Touchpad -> uncheck scrolling directions. Apple also changed gesture to do Expose (now known as Mission Control), honestly this will need some getting used to. There are no settings to give you back the familiar Expose gestures. (ex. four finger down = show desktop, up = expose all windows, no more 3 finger scroll to get to the top of bottom of a page)

7. Minor annoyance – Launchpad shows all the uninstaller apps as well. This is terrible if you have Adobe CS installed. You will get a bunch of uninstallers listed with the apps and it’s almost impossible to find your apps! Yes you can do folders, but if you have a lot of apps… good luck sorting all of them. Launchpad is especially useless in this situation when a Spotlight search can open you any app with a few keystrokes.

To sum up, I’m not overly impressed with Lion. Especially the decision to drop legacy SMB/AFP authentication! I think if Apple didn’t sell it for $29.99 I wouldn’t even recommend it to people. Some of the changes are certainly nice, but nothing groundbreaking as you would expect from a major OS release. In fact, many of the neat features you saw during WWDC are app-specific and it will only benefit you if the developers choose to use it. Apple likes to build only the API and leave the rest to the developers, where from a customer’s perspective we like Apple to implement it in the system so all apps may take advantage of it. This is especially true regarding Versions. Apple could have improved the filesystem to support version control natively.

Having said that, I do think it is worth the $29.99 it sells for and Apple is certainly on the right path of revamping its OSes to stay ahead of the curve.

I think the guys from gdgt just compiled the source from the Chromium OS project… and using this as bait to increase traffic to their site. Anyway, they did an ok job and you do have to register on gdgt to download it.

Here are some screenshots of Chrome OS.

The OS looks extremely similar to the Chrome browser, and it is basically a complete standalone version of Google Chrome. This early developer build has very little configurable options… actually apart from those security and web related options you get from the Chrome browser there are only options to enable Tap to Click, and some mouse/touchpad sensitivity settings.

From the screenshots you will notice that ChromeOS detected that it is running on a laptop computer and it has a space to display battery levels. You can also config timezone settings. The only problem was that the screen resolution was locked to 1024 x 768 and could not be changed.

Page rendering performance was also quite poor, possibly due to the lack of 3D acceleration from the VM. This is very noticeable as you scroll up and down, and when you have a Flash movie loaded.

That’s right, Flash is supported! Youtube works… but the performance is horrible, and again probably due to the lack of graphic acceleration.

From what I can tell from this early development version of Chrome OS, I’d say that Google has done a great job of moving from desktop computing to cloud computing, and bringing desktop applications to web applications. From the start, you login with your Google ID and everything you see is generated and supported by the cloud… and of course the courtesy of an active connection to the Internet.

Aside from the buzz it has generated, Chrome OS is not going to be too useful to the average user right now. Especially when you have Windows or MacOS preinstalled on your machine already. Maybe it will make more sense for low-power netbooks, but even then it will be useless without access to the Internet.

This sounds almost impossible to pull off… even in today’s world. Most popular shared plans cost more than $20…

But wait, introducing Unmanaged VPS service.

An unmanaged VPS is basically an empty VPS space with a metred uplink. The hosting companies will not install ANY software for you… no Apache, no MySQL… no PHP. You must do all the work yourself. Their job is keeping the physical servers and their uplinks online. (Previously I worked remotely for a web hosting firm… so I know a fair bit about keeping things running.)

Before choosing a hosting company, you must understand some of the terminologies used to value VPS packages.

CPU Speed/Limit: some hosts will give you an estimate of CPU in megahertz; obviously the higher number the faster. However, as a user you do not really have any practical way of measuring performance by looking these numbers… so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Other hosts will specify if multiple CPU instances are allowed on the VPS to create a virtual multi-core space. These options are probably very expensive. Choose wisely according to your budget.

RAM: like the RAM in your computer, RAM on your VPS will be a great limiting factor of performance. The OS, Apache, MySQL, PHP instances all require quite a bit of RAM to run. I would say that 128MB is the absolute minimum you should have. I would recommend getting at least 256MB… because after I installed everything on my VPS… it was eating up more than 200mb while idling. I seriously would not recommend running production sites on a 128MB VPS.

Burst RAM: since resources on the physical server are still shared among multiple users, each VPS instance will have a guaranteed RAM size and a burst or peak size. The burst RAM specifies the maximum amount of RAM the VPS is allowed to allocate should the resources be available. You will see companies advertise their plans as 512MB RAM/1024MB Burst. This indicates that your VPS will get 512MB in any situation, and it is allowed to go up to 1024MB or 1GB when it is under load and the other VPS spaces on your server can spare you a few MB of RAM.

Bandwidth: no explanation needed here. definitely more the better. Most hosts will offer you quite a bit of bandwidth. A few hundred GBs will do for small to medium sites.

IP: each VPS should be accompanied by its own IP address. usually this is included in the initial process of setting up your account. You may also ask for more IPs at your expense.

Control Panels: Unmanaged VPSs do not include goodies like cPanel, which is slightly annoying at times. However, I’m a guy that grew up on Webmin – an open source, generic remote management application. I will be posting a guide on how to set up Webmin as your control panel and perform some of the tasks you do in cPanel. No big deal! However, if you really need cPanel, you can licensing it at about $10/month extra.

Virtual Machine: I do not know a lot about virtualization to create VPS spaces… However I can tell you that most people favour Xen machines because it is impossible for the host to oversell the server. When you have Xen, what you see is really what you get. OpenVZ and HyperVM are usually geared toward low-end VPS spaces where servers are packed with clients, and they offer very limited admin interfaces. So go with Xen if the price is within your budget, otherwise try to look for OpenVZ… HyperVM is the worst as reported by other users.

After reading some reviews and getting some recommendations from friends. I nailed my choices to:

linode.com – Genuine Xen powered VPS spaces, not oversold, awesome admin features, quad-core CPU instances.
intovps.com – OpenVZ powered, very cheap.
fsckvps.com - both OpenVZ and Xen spaces. fairly cheap.

However, after reading encouraging reviews and seeing some very pretty benchmarks on webhostingtalk.com…
I was introduced to this particular host – ramhost.us
They are a new and small company, but the feedback on the forums are surprisingly positive and their prices are VERY competitive!

I went with their 40GB, 512MB RAM + 1GB Burst with 500GB uplink package for $11.99/mo. The server is SUPER fast! low latency! and their support is simply amazing! Someone will respond to your request in minutes, and the support person goes out of his way to help customers.

Right now I’m in the process of transferring my sites from this shared server to my shiny new VPS.
At this price, I will certainly choose VPS over shared hosting from now on!

I will be posting guides soon on this blog to teach everyone how to setup a CentOS 5 powered VPS from scratch!