Installing Leopard on the 15

December 22, 2007

Leopard requires at least an 867Mhz CPU, this iMac has 800. I only need the install to test some OS hacks so I’m pretty sure the 67Mhz delta will not have a big impact. Time to modify some packages…

  • Clone the Leopard DVD onto a writable volume

    mkdir ~/osinstall; cd ~/osinstall
xar -xf /Volumes/Leopard/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg
sed -i .old -e 's/866000000/0/' ./Distribution
mv OSInstall.mpkg ../
sudo xar -cf /Volumes/Leopard/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg .

  • Boot the iMac with the modified package and install

Some notes

  • I can understand why Apple would like to introduce a new flat archive file for file distribution (folders don’t move well across networks), but I think the OS install DVD is not the right place to implement it. We can no longer see the package contents from the Finder and sysadmins who customize packages now have an extra hoop to jump through.

  • BOM’s are luckily still readable without extra decompression inside /Library/Receipts/boms

  • use “nano +39 Distribution” if you want to change the freq. test to something less drastic

  • This was all done using another Leopard machine, Tiger users have to install XAR separately

  • Disable sleep on the iMac in Leopard, otherwise this happens.