Wednesday, September 05, 2012

The Peril's of Upgrading

As a lot of people have done, I recently upgraded my Mac to Mountain Lion (OSx 10.8 (subsequently installing the 10.8.1 upgrade that was released not long after my upgraded)).

As with any operating system. there are some things that just don't work after the upgrade.  Sadly, I expected this, as I have yet to find an OS that doesn't break something upon upgrading.  When I upgraded one of my Ubuntu boxes after 11.10 came out, I was blown away by the number of things it screwed me on.  Some of the critical things I used every day were completely gone, such as:

- Apache
- Python
- MySQL

Just to name a very small subset.  All of the command line installation utilities that are necessary for building software by hand were also gone.  It took me a couple hours but thanks to my backups prior, I was able to get everything back in working order relatively quickly.

But, I digress a bit, sorry.  After upgrading to Mountain Lion, I didn't immediately notice anything awry.  The post installation notice did notify me that some apps were not compatible.  For instance, Parallels stopped working, so you will have to download a new version or re-install if you have the version compatible with the new OSx version.

One thing I noticed though, was that installing things with easy_install or pip (python package installer) had gone away or stopped working.  The same was true for setuptools, which is used when installing with things like like pip or easy_install.

To correct some of the things that will drive you crazy, you will want to go to this site.   If you haven't done it after upgrading, you will need to probably re-install Xcode and then, per that link, install the commandline tools that it references.  I know it says some had issues, I didn't experience any thankfully.

As I mentioned a couple of paragraphs above, my setuptools had completely disappeared from the installation after the upgrade.  So, to re-install them, you will need to download them from the PyPi page here.  Download the most current .egg and then issue the following command:

sudo sh setuptools-0.6c11-py2.7.egg

I used the most current .egg version as of this posting for the command above.  After working through the issues that I had experienced post upgrade, my system is again back to where I want/need it for my daily work.  Hopefully this will help you as well.  Remember also that there are a plethora of other post Mountain Lion upgrade guides on Google, just search for them.  What I have here is obviously not the be all, end all.
 
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.