Today I made the happy discovery that even our aged 580 series Smartboards work with Lion. Yay! Our school has been gradually buying Smartboards over the last decade, which means some classrooms have some very antique models (with serial to USB cables and the old-style round erasers. I once rang Smart’s UK technical support about one of these boards and they were in complete shock that they still worked at all…). I was not looking forward to paying thousands to replace them when we either bought new Lion Macs or upgraded from Snow Leopard.
Smart still claim that OSX 10.7 isn’t officially supported by their Notebook software, but they have released a patch that fixes things up well enough.
Primary ICT 
Hello, what did you do to get Lion working with a 500 series Smartboard? We’ve had no luck. Thanks
Hi
We’ve found that the USB-serial cables tend to die when connected to a Mac, particularly when old. A newer cable can fix things.
Also Notebook 10.8 and its drivers seemed to work with Lion ok (once you’ve installed the patch). I’ve only tested it briefly with one machine and one board, so I’m hoping it will work if we upgrade all our machines to Lion…
Hi Tim, thanks for your reply! We tried new cables along with 10.8 and the patch with no changes. We have new Macbook Pro, Mac Mini and Macbook Air as test beds. We’re thinking of using Mac’s in the classroom instead of PC’s. The only thing I’ve found that works is running the Mac’s in 32 bit mode. I’m guessing yours must be running 32 bit? Thanks, Scott
My word, that is a lot of smartboards!
I don’t think I was running them in 32-bit mode, but maybe I was. I will try and check again and some point and let you know.
Smart’s glacial speed with sorting out Mac software updates for their boards is pretty terrible. Do they have an official stance on 500 series support?
I forgot to add that we have 80 of the 500 series boards and probably 350 Smartboards total. We’re looking at big bucks to replace 80 boards! 🙂