So after the ignominy of actually showing up to the farce of the retail effort (see below), and after dinner and a few other tasks I sat down at about 8pm to get the install running.   I popped the DVD in the slot of my currently-off iMac, hit the power button and hung on to that Option key.  Apple thoughtfully omit to tell users that option is available.  Those not in the know would have had to have booted Tiger only to have the machine restart.  Poor, Apple.  Really poor.  It would have taken only a sentence to remedy.

Thankfully I had received advice on the approach I was to take, so knew pretty much what I was doing in the initial stages.  I selected “Archive and install” and set about omitting oodles of languages and printer drivers and then set the beast in motion after about 5 minutes of effort and checking and double checking.  At least, I knew, I had a tested bootable backup that was up to date as at the last power down.

OK, so I said I knew what I was doing.  I totally failed to realise the DVD verification was skippable.  So… half an hour later…

I’ve spent many a year watching progress bars.  Apple’s are amongst the prettiest for sure.  But for sure, too, their calculations of time-to-run are as farcical as any other.  First up, it reported a solid 2 hours and 45 minutes to run!  Within a minute, it was down to a more palatable 54 minutes.  By the time it reached half way acorss the bar, the total bottomed at 17 minutes from where it followed something close to real time.  Except.  Except!  Whilst it was trending towards zero in a familiar way, the final words “About a minute” (as they appeared I thought ironic that now, at the most accurate point of the affair, it should descend to such vague verbage) stayed on the screen for something more like 5 to 10 minutes.  I wasn’t looking at my watch at that point because for the whole time it was almost finished!

Finally a big tick appeared and with the click of a button the magical sights and sounds of a reboot were upon me.

After logging on I was heartened to see my wallpaper return and the usual events begin.  The myriad menu widgets appearing, my chat applications starting and…

Holy crap!  At this point about a dozen warnings and requests leap to the screen fighting for my attention.  Keychain messages saying that an application has changed (it hasn’t, the Keychain has!) various login items insist on attention for logins (to Samba shares) and permissions problems and much more besides.  I adopted a defensive posture and one by one dealt with the little upstarts.  The last one to receive attention being the one that had the Restart button (due to the login item permission problem).  Despite the intensity, each had its purpose and was despatched easily.
I’m happy to say the second reboot resulted in pretty much what I expected and hoped for.  Next would be the fun of discovery.  My browser was alive (Firefox) and my GMail began to fill with the rapid discoveries of my brother who had been installing his own.  More on that later.

Rating: Excellent!  (for Apple, poor for me for missing that skip button!)