Yesterday Apple announced El Capitan (OS X 10.11) would be released by the end of September. At the same time they made the
Gold Master available to beta testers through the App Store. Will it surprise anyone here to know that I have already installed it? Anyway I want to share a few things with you about El Capitan and the installation.
- I like it! 😄 No big surprise there, but compared to Yosemite, El Capitan is…
- Faster (especially Safari 9.0 that is part of the release)
- More stable
- More Bullet Proof (potentially exploitable features have been completely disabled or shielded)
- Requires less maintenance (In fact many of the old routine preventative maintenance and/or troubleshooting functions are either not available in El Capitan or they are deprecated and strongly not recommended. For example permission repair, housekeeping routines, and defragmenting of files or volumes. Some functions troubleshooters have taken for granted in the past are not even possible in El Capitan.
- Warning:
- A few old programs may have to be redesigned, rewritten, or substantially modified because functions they depended on are blocked by El Capitan to prevent their being exploited by malware.
- Do not use third party utilities such as TechTool Pro 8, Drive Genius 4, DiskWarrior, TinkerTool, TinkerTool System, MacPilot, OnyX, etc. until the developer has certified them for use with El Capitan
- Caution:
- CarbonCopyCloner 3.5 will not run on El Capitan. CCC 4 will run but I have verified whether or not it can produce a bootable clone or if that clone retains the security protections of El Capitan.
- The latest version of SuperDuper (version 2.7.5(v. 95)) runs but for some reason I was not able to produce a bootable clone using it and I have not taken time to troubleshoot the issue.
- Before Installing El Capitan
- Be certain you have a good Time Machine or other backup before installing El Capitan — no one has yet been able to repeal Murphy’s law.
- It is a good idea to run Disk Utility > Volume Repair, TechTool Pro 8 > Volume Repair, Drive Genius 4 > Repair and/or Rebuild, or DiskWarrior to be sure your volume structures are in good shape.
- Be certain all of your Applications, Utilities, plugins, kernel extensions, etc. are up to date. The App Store will keep anything you get from there up to date (you really should turn on automatic updating) but non-App Store software is up to the developer and it behooves you to be very vigilant and do not put updates off. Etrecheck can be helpful here — as of this morning, the current version is 2.4.2.
- Because of increased security measures in El Capitan you may find some of your applications will have to be reinstalled because the El Capitan installer will have removed and discarded some third party files from system areas. Generally reinstallation is all it takes to restore functionality but there may be cases where you will have to get an update from the developer.
- Based on my experience installing the Gold Master I would encourage you to disconnect any and all unessential peripherals before the install. The install will go faster and you are less likely to encounter problems during the install. Other than that the install seems pretty bullet proof.
Much wise counsel there.
For moi, the point about disconnecting peripherals is especially noteworthy. ( I once had a peripheral that needed to unmount as part of the second reboot of an upgrade. But it didn't. Predictable results necessitating another install.)
And I'll especially heed the advice about DiskWarrior and the like, as I am guilty of always running that immediately after an update.
And thus, my thanks!
