How To: Enable Front Row On Mac OS X 10.7 Lion [Installer]

Now that you know how to burn your own copy of Lion to a DVD and create a bootable USB Drive, here’s a nifty trick to get Front Row back on you Mac. As you may or may not know, Lion no longer has Front Row as a feature. Front Row was that nifty little Media Player that would bring up a nice full screen interface, which would later be used on the Apple TV. If you were or are a user of Front Row, and now have upgraded to Lion, there is a way to get it back. You will however need access to a Mac running 10.6 to do this trick.

There are 2 ways of getting it back, and we will cover both. One is manual, copying the files over yourself, and the second method is via an installer.

First, you can manually copy the files for Front Row to your new OSX Lion installation. These files can be found on any Mac running OSX 10.6 and can be found here:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/BackRow.framework
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/iPhotoAccess.framework
/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.RemoteUI.plist
/Applications/Front Row.app

All you need to do once you get those files is just copy them to the same location in Lion, and voila, Front Row is back. Again, this method requires that you have access to a 10.6 install of OSX. If not, then follow the next method.

Alternatively, we can use an installer. MacHatter created an installer to use that basically copies these files to your Mac for you. You can download that here. The installer shows you the files that it is copying back in, the same as in the manual method we had above.

Rumors are now spreading that because it is so easy to get Front Row working, Apple may release a paid app in the Mac App Store to users who would like their Front Row back in Lion. For now, you can get it back for free, and pretty easily as well.

 

About the Author

David is a Systems Engineer by day and a Competitive Triathlete on the weekends. He is an avid Apple fan who also loves everything Google. He writes on everything and loves to share news with fellow techies.

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