OSX Lion Development preview 4 has hit the hands of developers. We are going to run though the installation and point out some things you should know about the process. Let dive right in here. Both machines I Tried to install to Macbook pro and mac pro using the App Store image file had issues installing. The Macpro running Snow leopard server in my home office would not upgrade without purchasing the server apps from the app store before installation.

I went ahead and made a current full backup of both machines using an app I love and have been using for a long time SuperDuper.

On the MacPro I decided to wipe the drive and install the client version of lion for now and upgrade to server later. Once my backup was complete, I went ahead and created a USB boot disk to install Lion from. The install USB is used for both installs Details can be found here

The MacPro clean installation went fine and smooth too about 15-20min I then used the migration tool to move all my apps, documents and settings over from my backup I made earlier and of course this took some time a few hours ( I have about 900gb+ of data on the drive) also note spotlight needed to rescan this took some time after the install was done and put some load on the machine as well.

The MacBookPro upgrade using the USB stick went off fine not sure why it would not work the other way. Same thing here took good 15-20min for the installation then about another 20min setting up.

Updates after installation

1. Java Runtime update
2. OSX update

Side Note: Keep in mind this is still beta but worth knowing. When doing a fresh install then migrating from Snow Leopard it seems the migration utility migrated the old safari v5 over. This did not happen when doing an upgrade from Snow Leopard it produced the right version 5.1