Mavericks Anyone?

After the disaster known as Yosemite, I decided to give Mavericks a try. Luckily, I downloaded the Mavericks installer awhile ago. Just never got around to installing it due to keeping my workstation working as it is my production access machine. But this holiday season and getting a new iPhone 6 Plus got me wanting to upgrade. The main attraction for me upgrading is actually the integrated iBooks app. I have a large library of books in epub and pdfs. And now I finally have a device where I can comfortable read on the go even if I don’t have a tablet. The old iPhone 5’s screen was just a little too small.

I was also adventurous in upgrading to Mavericks as I had proven that I could always go back to Mountain Lion off my backup anytime. After it installed in about an hour, it rebooted the mac. I was apprehensive to see what had broken. To my pleasant surprise, the Mavericks experience was MUCH MUCH better! The problems that plagued me with Yosemite didn’t exist. The thunderbolt dock worked. So did the usb3 DisplayLink! All the apps just worked, except one that I’ll get to later. I had to set up my Apache PHP dev environment again, but that’s to be expected as it is a newer version of PHP. The one application that didn’t work was mysql 5.5.29. The reason for it was when I upgraded the OS, there was a path referenced in /etc/my.cnf that no longer existed. I didn’t realize that at the time and I upgraded to a newer version of mysql. And when I did that, it removed my existing version of 5.5 binaries. Kinda pissed me off that it did that. I wished it would have alerted me and gave me an option to keep the old binaries around. At least, it didn’t destroy my data directory. That would have been really painful.

All in all, a very smooth upgrade. I like the simple epub reader. It was kind of jarring that the epub library was moved from iTunes to iBook. A little message would have been appreciated. I guess I will have to wait a lot longer before attempting to upgrade to Yosemite.