If you want to run Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Developer Preview but you don’t want to bother setting up another partition or upgrading your existing Mac OS X 10.6 installation, you can go with a third option: running Lion in a virtual machine with VMWare.
This is really only recommended for more technically inclined Mac OS X users. If you’re serious about Lion development, remember that virtual machines have their limitations, and you should probably just setup a dedicated partition to run the developer preview directly. Having a dedicated partition will ultimately perform better and the installation process is a lot easier than setting this up to run in VMware. Anyway, if you want to try out Lion in a VM, here’s what you’ll need:
Requirements to Install & Run Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in VMWare:
- Mac OS X 10.7 Developer Preview – developers can download this from Apple
- VMware Fusion for Mac OS X – here’s the free 30 day trial version
- Patience – there’s some setup required here, so if you’re lazy this isn’t for you
- Optional/Recommended: plenty of RAM
Regarding the RAM requirement, VMware and virtual machines in general perform best with a lot of RAM, if you plan on using them often on your Mac it’s highly recommended to upgrade to 8GB. With how cheap RAM is these days, I consider it an essential upgrade for power users. If you’re curious, you can read my review of 8GB RAM upgrade for a MacBook Pro where I detail the advantages of having a bunch of memory.
The Walkthrough:
Everything ready? Then check out the great walkthrough from ObviousLogic: Installing Lion in VMware, it’s broken down into 12 steps that are easy to follow.
[ Image credit: r2×2 ]
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