How to install OS X Yosemite safely and without being a developer

The weekend has arrived, the ideal time to venture out to "try new things" and one of them could be to try OS X Yosemite, Of which you have read, heard and seen a lot and that you will want to see live to be able to assess it so, we are going to test OS X Yosemite on our Mac safely.

Download OS X Yosemite DP1

OS X Yosemite It is available now, but only for developers and in Beta 1. What does that mean? Well, neither more nor less than it is still in a very early stage of development, which is why it may be unstable, and not all its new features and functions are yet at full capacity. For this reason, we should not install it on our main disk if not on a partition that we are going to do for it because, even if it is a Beta 1, we can already fiddle with it and see what we like the most and what we least.

The first thing we will do is download the installer from OS X Yosemite And, since we assume that we are not developers, we can do it from here where you will find two download formulas: direct through Mega or through torrent, for which you will need a special program such as uTorrent. As the file weighs a not inconsiderable 4,7 GB and it will take "a little bit", while it is complete we are going to partition on our Mac (and it is more than likely that we still have time).

Make a partition on our Mac

Creating a partition on our Mac is very simple:

1. We open Disk Utility
2. We select the main drive
3. Click on the Partitions tab
4. In "Disposition of partitions", we display the menu and select 2 partitions
5. We click on the new one and, on the right, we assign a name to it (I have called it OS X Yosemite DP1) and we write the size that we want to assign it (since we are not going to work with it, just test it and fiddle with it, just assign it about 10GB (I have assigned 20)
6. We make sure that the format is "Mas OS Plus (with registry)"
7. We give "Apply", we accept and we wait.

The following image will guide you through the process described to create a partition.

Installing OS X 10.10 Yosemite DP1

Now comes the simplest of all, install OS X Yosemite on the partition we have created in such a way that we can boot our Mac both from OS X Mavericks (our main disk) and from OS X Yosemite (our secondary partition).

And this is as simple as opening the OS X Yosemite installer that we have downloaded and following the usual process with the only exception that, when it asks us on which disk we want to install it, we will click on «Show all discs» and we will choose OS X Yosemite DP 1, that is, the partition that we have created for this purpose.

Our Mac will restart several times, don't worry! This is normal. When the process is finished, which can last around 20 minutes approximately, our Mac will restart from the OS X Yosemite DP1 partition and we can test the new Apple operating system. I leave you a screenshot of my installation:

Now, to go back to your main disk with OS X Mavericks you have two ways to do it:

• From System Preferences → Startup disk → you select it and press restart (as you see in the image above)
• Restart your Mac while holding down the Alt key, select the disk and voila.

If you dare to try OS X Yosemite leave us your impressions in the comments. I am delighted though, the only defect I see is the Dock that if it only kept the three-dimensionality of the current one it would already be almost perfect.