Many of the Apple Stores as well as third party retailers have started preparing for OS X Lion launch. Some Apple Stores have put up covered banners that are rumored to be OS X Lion signage. Third party retailers in Europe have also started posting banner for OS X Lion. It is also reported that Apple Stores are planning “overnights” today to change out promotional materials and update their systems.

In other OS X Lion related news, 9to5mac is reporting:

Our tipsters say most stores have recently received an external LaCie hard drive containing Lion installs, but we have received new information that the drives contain 3 different install images for Lion; Normal, Pro, and Joint Venture.

JointVenture is an enterprise membership program to support businesses running Macs and iDevices. It is believed that each of these installs will include unique software titles, and some of which could be new.

Furthermore we’ve heard rumblings that some stores will be receiving maxed out Mac Pro towers to be used as Lion distribution caching centers (speculation here). Some believe that these stations would allow customers to purchase Lion (3.5GB) from the Mac App store and download it directly from the store server in minutes rather than hours it takes over a normal broadband connection.

We should hear more about OS X Lion launch at Apple’s quarterly revenue result conference, which will start shortly.