What we do know, is that the Macbooks purchased as part of the 2011 Laptop bulk purchase will be eligible for a free upgrade to Lion. As we learn the details of the free upgrades, we will post updates.
For those wishing to upgrade older Intel Macs, you are supposed to first upgrade to the latest version of Snow Leopard (10.6.8). Snow Leopard appears to still be available for purchase through the Apple Store for UC Berkeley for $29.
Note that we do not generally recommend personal purchases with reimbursement by UC accounts, due to the overhead costs involved. If you intend to use university funds for upgrading to Lion, it may be reasonable for your purchasing staff to order iTunes gift cards directly. Our staff are working with our Apple Reps to determine the recommended course of action.
UPDATE
[2011-07-22 10:54:58 | Lars Rohrbach]
Please note that we do NOT have a site license for Mac OS X.
Those who purchased Macbooks through the 2011 laptop bulk purchase may upgrade for free
via Apple’s Up-to-Date Program at (http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/ ),
or by borrowing a Lion install DVD at the IRIS Helpdesk (starting Monday, July 25).
For the Up-to-Date Program, you may need to enter “6/20/2011” as the purchase date,
and “Apple, Inc., Cupertino, CA” for the purchase location.
Puchases through the Apple App Store, including redemption of free upgrade codes,
require that you have or create an Apple ID.
An Apple ID is typically linked to a credit card, but it is possible to avoid this —
see Creating an iTunes App Store account without a credit card. [addendum: an App Store account without credit card can be used to order free Apps, but not to order a free Lion upgrade.]
Before upgrading to Lion, we recommend that you
check for any PowerPC apps
in use on your system. Lion no longer includes Rosetta support, so
PowerPC apps will no longer run.
Specifically, be sure to run Microsoft’s “AutoUpdate” if you have Office for Mac
installed, and be sure that any Norton AntiVirus installation has been
upgraded/replaced with Symantec Endpoint Protection.
The Lion Installer download is over 3.5 GiB.
Doing the Lion upgrade may take about an hour.
UPDATE
[2011-07-22 11:25:44 | Lars Rohrbach]
Among PowerPC programs, of particular note is the Oracle CalAgenda client for Mac. There’s no newer CalAgenda client software compatible with Lion, and no Oracle Connector For Outlook, but the web client
for CalAgenda should meet most needs.
Here’s a recent post from the campus Micronet list on this subject:
FWIW, I switched to using the Oracle Calendar web client (http://calagenda.berkeley.edu/view ) long ago. It's MUCH, MUCH faster than the Mac OS desktop client, the "find a time when the following people are available" feature works better, it doesn't crap out about every 60 minutes, etc.
By the way, a tip with the web client: To make it easier to access it from your personal workstation, do the following:
1) Log in to the web client at http://calagenda.berkeley.edu/view 2) Click on the preferences icon in the upper-right of the page that appears. 3) In the "Security" tab of the page that appears, check the "Enable automatic sign in" box. 4) Click OK
From then on, you won't be prompted for your username and password when you go to http://calagenda.berkeley.edu/view --you'll just go straight to your calendar.
Do note that you should only do this on your own computer--otherwise other users of the same computer will have access to your calendar.
In order to be notified of upcoming meetings, there are a couple of options that I've used: 1) I use SyncML Pro for iOS (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/syncml-pro-for-ios/id379601545?mt=8 ) to synchronize my iPhone's calendar with Oracle Calendar. My iPhone then beeps at me before each meeting
2) You can set Oracle Calendar to send you an email before each meeting. (See the preferences, as above.)
3) You can use the Oracle Calendar email notification to send you a text message. For example, to send a text to my phone on AT&T, I just set the email notification address to MYNUMBER@txt.att.net. See http://sms411.net/how-to-send-email-to-a-phone/ for other carriers.
For the rare times that I do need a desktop client (usually just when SyncML screws up and duplicates all my calendar entries), I just run the Windows Oracle Calendar client inside VMWare.
UPDATE
[2011-08-15 18:27:01 | Lars Rohrbach]
As with the release of any major operating system upgrade,
we recommend a cautious approach. If you decide to upgrade,
you may discover additional problems not known to us.
There are some reports of
problems with NVidia drivers on 2010 MacBook Pros.
With Lion, Apple apparently
replaced Samba with its own Windows networking software.
We are aware that Lion does not seem to work with our Active Directory
as well as Snow Leopard does.
In particular,
while Lion can successfully mount EECS home directories, it does not properly
automount home directories on machines bound to the EECS domain.
Also, restricting remote or login access to specific Active Directory groups may not work.