Due to a variety of obligations I was not able to pick up Leopard on Friday directly from the Apple Store. Even though I have one real one, and a very good 3rd party reseller within walking distance.

The first thing after the awesome galaxy picture on the front that striked me was the small box size. This is the exact same size as what comes with any of the new machines. It’s nice to see a major company like Apple work to reduce package waste this way. No doubt it saves them a lot of money too.

In this case I decided to sacrifice my Macbook Pro. It’s a first generation model, 1.83ghz, 2gb of RAM and an 80gb hard drive. In addition I have a 120gb firewire drive that I can use as a backup drive with Time Machine. The CD booted fairly quickly, about 15 seconds longer then the Tiger one that came with this machine in the first place.

After the initial choose your language box is another with a more information button. This tells you some of the less obvious potential gotchas in installing Leopard. Basic system requirements which are still pretty low, although all G4′s below 867mhz are now excluded. Also it tells you to make sure the firmware is up to date, which can be done from http://www.apple.com/support/downloads or from the Software Update Menu in Tiger. Of course it also recommends removing third party video and SCSI cards from the system.

Hit the continue button, agree to the EULA, then choose the hard drive you want to install on. Which is usually only one drive, but if you’ve got the Firewire on installed that could cause some problems. The install options are the same as they’ve ever been, Upgrade and Install, Archive and Install, or Erase and Install. Since I’ve already did a backup of this hard drive, and I want to limit any problems, Erase and Install to the rescue.

The next screen is the customization one where in addition to “Essential System Software,” Printer Drivers, Additional Fonts, Language Translations and X11 can be installed. To save hard drive space and because I don’t need any of these I uncheck each box and hit done. My space required is now down to 5.9gb!

The next step is about 15 minutes of the OS checking the Installation DVD. Then it formats the hard drive, and starts installing. Watching paint dry is nominally more interesting then this part, but alas it’s the most crucial step.

In total the install took roughly 45 minutes on this machine. I suspect most of that is due to the DVD drive read speed. On a Macpro, or one of the new Aluminum iMacs it’d take a lot less time.

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