Chapter 3. A Quick Guide to Lion
What You Need to Know About Mac OS X
Finding your way around Lion for the first time is exciting, but itâs also easy to miss out on many cool new features, especially if youâre new to Mac OS X or youâve been using an older version of the operating system. This chapter will get you up to speed on the basics of Mac OS X, with a special focus on whatâs new in Lion. Itâll familiarize you with the most important aspects of Mac OS X so you can get the most out of Appleâs best operating system to date. The logical place to start is with the first thing you created when you installed or ran Mac OS X for the first timeâyour account.
User Accounts
Lion is the latest and greatest from Apple, but the operating systemâs roots go all the way to Unix, a multiuser workstation and server operating system. Because Mac OS X is based on Unix, itâs also multiuser to its core. Even if no one but you ever touches your Mac, itâs still helpful to understand user accounts, because you may need to deal with them someday. Consider these situations:
As youâll learn shortly, you may want to set up an unprivileged account for day-to-day use to limit your vulnerability to mistakes and malicious software.
If you ever need to run a demonstration on your Mac, youâll probably want to create a separate account to run the demo to prevent interruptions from chat buddies, calendar reminders, and the like.
Even the most solitary Mac user eventually needs to let someone ...
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