Mavericks Available Today for Free

[Pirum]

I watched the announcement. Apple said that the free price was to insure as many people had this operating system as possible. They want EVERYONE to be updated to 10.9 apparently.

Yeah, I reckon Apple thinks too many people still use Snow Leopard. (I assume someone with Lion or ML certainly will go for Mavericks).
People have migrated (or ditched) Leopard, but got stuck on Snow Leopard - why upgrade to Lion or Mountain Lion? But Mavericks seems to be a different beast, it could work really well for older Macs too.
I'll try to talk my girlfriend into upgrading to Mavericks, she just recently left 10.5 as her bank required it for log in. She's on a Macbook Pro 2008 and hasn't seen much point in going to Lion or Mountain Lion - both her favourite programs Iphoto and Itunes are equally good, or better, on Snow Leopard. She also has Microsoft Office 2004, which works great for her needs, and that program won't work past 10.6 as it's PPC. I might convince her now to go on to Office 2008 and Mavericks. Anyway, enough of that, off to my system which I just upgraded:

Short story: GA-P55-USB3 v2 F9, i5-760, Asus Nvidia 8400GS, Fusion Drive. Mavericks 10.9.0 works.

Decided to try building a Fusion drive for the first time.

Used a small 40GB Intel SSD X25-V and 160GB Seagate 7200rpm SATA-drive. Figured that if this works out fine, I can move to faster 80GB SSD + larger HDD. Also, starting with a smaller SSD + "slow" HDD makes it easier to fill the system to a level where Fusion drive would make a difference. If Fusion Drive doesn't work as I hope, I'll go for the SSD and move user folder to HDD.

Booted from 10.8.3, set up Fusion drive using various guides from this forum.
Then I used Clover on USB to install Maverick from USB. I think I could have used Unibeast as well, as I think the Mac installer would have recognised the Fusion drive?

Install worked fine, took 19 minutes, I used Multibeast _5_ to enable Chimera, network and USB3, using DSDT.
I trust the old boot-configuration for my GA-P55-USB3.
And then I used Multibeast 6 to enable ALC892 sound. I copied the Extra-folder, and the boot-files to the hidden Fusion-partitions, rebooted, and had a working Mavericks Haven't tried sleep, I don't expect it to work and don't use it anyway.

Worked a lot better than expected. I'm not sure Clover is needed at all. And I also think I could have used Multibeast 6 and changed some defaults settings, but I felt more comfortable with Multibeast 5.

Various issues: Chimera 2.2.1 couldn't enable QE/CI using my ATI Radeon HD4650, which I had used from 10.6.4 to 10.8.3. (Never upgraded ML fully as I was waiting for Mavericks). It is is recognized as some 3MB ATI-whatever-card. Using Chimera 1.9.something it works fine, but then I can't boot into Mavericks. Neither did Clover work, it recognized my card as 5MB HD4710. Maybe something have changed in ati.c , or Apple has made changes to ATI after 10.8.3. I have no clue really and haven't had time to check it out. Solution - I put my old ASUS Nvidia 8400GS into the system, worked great. Eventually I will have to use another solution though, the 8400 is a bit too slow even for me.

As with earlier versions of OSX, I've had some issues with my optical reader/writer (Lite-on ihbs-112 bluray) going to sleep (I think) and not properly waking up. I disabled drive sleep in preferences, seems to work now. I also believe I have to add a patch for it to make the DVD-Player see it as a DVD-drive. DVD-Player works though, as do Chess and ripple effect and stuff.