Installing OS X Leopard on my old 1.4GHz PowerPC 1GB Mac Mini went surprisingly well. I used Lacie SilverKeeper to back up my Tiger hard drive before wiping it out and doing a clean installation. I avoided installing all of the extra languages and printer drivers and managed to save several gigabytes of hard drive space for other stuff. The only thing I had trouble installing was <c>rdiff-backup</c>, which is a UNIX utility for performing backups. OS X Leopard sports the vaunted Time Machine for its own backups, but I run a Linux Debian Etch server, which I back up across the wire using <c>rdiff-backup</c>. I followed the instructions for installing on OS X---which were much the same as what I'd once done for OS X Tiger---but lost patience. In order to install this UNIX utility, I need to build it from source. In order to have a working C-compiler, I need <c>gcc</c>. The only known way to install a reliable version of <i>that</i> is to install the developer tools from Apple, which means installing 2GB worth of <i>XCode</i>. It also means installing an extra 600MB of "UNIX-compatible" command-line utilities on top of that, which are probably what the build system in MacPorts or Fink is going to need. Oh yeah, MacPorts and Fink are Linux-style package managers for OS X which also download and install an uncomfortably large number of files. Once you've bit the bullet and installed MacPorts and XCode, you can try installing the packages for <c>rdiff-backup</c>, if you have the patience. Compiling on this poor old machine is like watching paint dry ... and MacPorts compiles <i>everything</i>. Though Leopard sports version 2.5 of Python, MacPorts was halfway through compiling its own 2.4 version (after setting up other things for what must have been more than an hour) before I throttled it in its crib. Enough is enough; I'm using a Mac here, for Christ's sake. If you, like me, would like to completely undo the mistakes you've made (i.e. you don't plan on using XCode yet and don't plan on using any other Unix utilities), here are some simple commands you can use to eradicate all traces of MacPorts and XCode.<fn> To remove all installed ports applications (including half-compiled proggies), open a Terminal window and execute: <code> sudo port -f uninstall installed </code> To remove all traces of MacPorts itself, open a Terminal window and execute: <code> sudo rm -rf /opt/local \ /Applications/MacPorts \ /Applications/DarwinPorts \ /Library/Tcl/macports1.0 \ /Library/Tcl/darwinports1.0 \ /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.* \ /Library/StartupItems/DarwinPortsStartup \ /Library/Receipts/MacPorts*.pkg \ /Library/Receipts/DarwinPorts*.pkg \ ~/.macports </code> To remove XCode, open a Terminal window and execute: <code> sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all </code> There. Now you're back to a relatively clean, standard OS X installation without a lot of Unix-y clutter. <hr> <ft>Tips for removal found at the <a href="http://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#WhyisoptlocalthedefaultinstalllocationforMacPorts">MacPorts FAQ</a> and <a href="http://macdevelopertips.com/xcode/how-to-uninstall-xcode.html" source="" author="">How to Uninstall Xcode</a>.</ft>