The Disk Utility method is the way to go for people who are more comfortable in the Finder (though it does require a couple Terminal commands), and it works under Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion.

MacOS Big Sur elevates Mac to a new level of power and beauty with a refined new design, major app updates, and more transparency around your privacy. This is what people conventionally do with the Windows, and forthwith the Snow Leopard installation image empowers the users to get it done exactly the same way. You just need a Mac Computer with the system supporting either 64 or 32-Bit architecture. 5.5 GB of free hard disk space is also expected along with 2GB minimum RAM.

The steps below will guide you through how to Install OS X Snow Leopard from a USB Flash Drive. Alternatively, you can also read these instructions on how to install OS X Lion from a USB Flash Drive.

Apple officially released Snow Leopard a couple years ago and consumers can still find the latest version of OS X at Apple Stores and resellers across the country.

At version 10.6, Snow Leopard, focused more on improving speed and performance than adding new features to OS X. With the operating system available to customers, individuals are ready for their upgrades.

Installing OS X From a USB Drive

Like other versions of OS X, Snow Leopard can be installed from a USB drive. This is especially beneficial to Macbook Air users looking to install the OS without a DVD drive. To do this, you’ll need to prepare your USB drive with the installation files. Like many of our other Mac Help articles, the steps listed below worked particularly for Snow Leopard but should also work for installing OS X from USB on Leopard.

The installation files sit at 6.2gb on the Snow Leopard DVD, so you’ll probably need a drive that has at least 8gb available. If you want your installation files to last against the elements, check out this 8 GB Water/Shock Resistant USB flash drive.

After you’ve gotten the correct USB device, connect it to your Mac and prepare it with the Snow Leopard installation files by following these steps:

NOTE:Depending on your flash drive, you may need to follow steps 5 – 7 on installing onto a USB drive to make sure the drive is bootable before you get start. This includes updating the options for the partition so that it is set to a GUID partition. If the USB drive is not bootable you will NOT be able to install from it.

1. Open Disk Utility and select the Flash Drive
2. Select the Erase tab on the right and then set Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Name the partition you’ll be creating Snow Leopard or OS X Install so you can keep track of your installation device. After you’ve done this, click the Erase button.
3. After Disk Utility finishes erasing your old data on the flash drive and setting it as a new partition, it will be ready for the Snow Leopard install files. Select the Restore tab at the top and then drag the Snow Leopard DVD to the Source field. Select your USB device for the Destination file. Click Restore and wait for the restoration to finish (about 20 minutes).
4. If the restoration worked correctly you should be able to open your USB device and see the Leopard installation files. If you try and click the Install OS X Snow Leopard icon, you’ll get the message below telling you you can’ install OS X from this volume. IGNORE the message. The next steps will walk you through the installation steps.
5. Now that the installation files are successfully on your USB device, be sure to remove the Snow Leopard installation DVD from your drive. Next, restart your Mac and when it first starts to reboot, be sure to hold down the option (alt) key on your keyboard. After a few seconds at least two volumes should appear for you to select from for installation. One of those will be the USB drive we just prepared. Select it.
6. After the Snow Leopard installation software boots from your USB drive, follow the on screen instructions for installation. It took about 38 minutes to install Snow Leopard on my machine from the USB drive. I’m curious to see how this compares to the average Mac users, please leave a post in the comments letting us know how long it took on your machine.
7. After the installation finishes, it will reboot your computer into your new upgraded version of OS X, version 10.6 Snow Leopard

This method works for installing OS X Snow Leopard onto a Mac from a USB Drive. It should also work for installing Leopard or other older versions of OS X on Intel Based Macs. Check back often for additional help and tips for your Mac.

Quickstart

1. Install Xcode and the Xcode Command Line Tools
2. Agree to Xcode license in Terminal: sudo xcodebuild -license
3. Install MacPorts for your version of the Mac operating system:

Installing MacPorts

MacPorts version 2.6.4 is available in various formats for download and installation (note, if you are upgrading to a new major release of macOS, see the migration info page):

• “pkg” installers for Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra, for use with the macOS Installer. This is the simplest installation procedure that most users should follow after meeting the requirements listed below. Installers for legacy platforms Sierra, El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion, Lion, Snow Leopard, Leopard and Tiger are also available.
• In source form as either a tar.bz2 package or a tar.gz one for manual compilation, if you intend to customize your installation in any way.
• Git clone of the unpackaged sources, if you wish to follow MacPorts development.
• The selfupdate target of the port(1) command, for users who already have MacPorts installed and wish to upgrade to a newer release.

Checksums for our packaged downloads are contained in the corresponding checksums file.

The public key to verify the detached GPG signatures can be found under the attachments section on jmr's wiki page. (Direct Link).

Please note that in order to install and run MacPorts on macOS, your system must have installations of the following components:

1. Apple's Xcode Developer Tools (version 12.2 or later for Big Sur, 11.3 or later for Catalina, 10.0 or later for Mojave, 9.0 or later for High Sierra, 8.0 or later for Sierra, 7.0 or later for El Capitan, 6.1 or later for Yosemite, 5.0.1 or later for Mavericks, 4.4 or later for Mountain Lion, 4.1 or later for Lion, 3.2 or later for Snow Leopard, or 3.1 or later for Leopard), found at the Apple Developer site, on your Mac operating system installation CDs/DVD, or in the Mac App Store. Using the latest available version that will run on your OS is highly recommended, except for Snow Leopard where the last free version, 3.2.6, is recommended.

2. Apple's Command Line Developer Tools can be installed on recent OS versions by running this command in the Terminal:

   Older versions are found at the Apple Developer site, or they can be installed from within Xcode back to version 4. Users of Xcode 3 or earlier can install them by ensuring that the appropriate option(s) are selected at the time of Xcode's install ('UNIX Development', 'System Tools', 'Command Line Tools', or 'Command Line Support').

3. Xcode 4 and later users need to first accept the Xcode EULA by either launching Xcode or running:
4. (Optional) The X11 windowing environment for ports that depend on the functionality it provides to run. You have multiple choices for an X11 server:
   • Install the xorg-server port from MacPorts (recommended).
   • The XQuartz Project provides a complete X11 release for macOS including server and client libraries and applications. It has however not been updated since 2016.
   • Apple's X11.app is provided by the “X11 User” package on older OS versions. It is always installed on Lion, and is an optional installation on your system CDs/DVD with previous OS versions.

macOS Package (.pkg) Installer

The easiest way to install MacPorts on a Mac is by downloading the pkg or dmg for Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion, Lion, Snow Leopard, Leopard or Tiger and running the system's Installer by double-clicking on the pkg contained therein, following the on-screen instructions until completion.

This procedure will place a fully-functional and default MacPorts installation on your host system, ready for usage. If needed your shell configuration files will be adapted by the installer to include the necessary settings to run MacPorts and the programs it installs, but you may need to open a new shell for these changes to take effect.

The MacPorts “selfupdate” command will also be run for you by the installer to ensure you have our latest available release and the latest revisions to the “Portfiles” that contain the instructions employed in the building and installation of ports. After installation is done, it is recommended that you run this step manually on a regular basis to to keep your MacPorts system always current:

At this point you should be ready to enjoy MacPorts!

Install Snow Leopard Without Cd

Type “man port” at the command line prompt and/or browse over to our Guide to find out more information about using MacPorts. Help is also available.

Source Installation

If on the other hand you decide to install MacPorts from source, there are still a couple of things you will need to do after downloading the tarball before you can start installing ports, namely compiling and installing MacPorts itself:

1. “cd” into the directory where you downloaded the package and run “tar xjvf MacPorts-2.6.4.tar.bz2” or “tar xzvf MacPorts-2.6.4.tar.gz”, depending on whether you downloaded the bz2 tarball or the gz one, respectively.
2. Build and install the recently unpacked sources:
   • cd MacPorts-2.6.4
   • ./configure && make && sudo make install
   Optionally:
   • cd ../
   • rm -rf MacPorts-2.6.4*

These steps need to be perfomed from an administrator account, for which “sudo” will ask the password upon installation. This procedure will install a pristine MacPorts system and, if the optional steps are taken, remove the as of now unnecessary MacPorts-2.6.4 source directory and corresponding tarball.

To customize your installation you should read the output of “./configure --help | more” and pass the appropriate options for the settings you wish to tweak to the configuration script in the steps detailed above.

You will need to manually adapt your shell's environment to work with MacPorts and your chosen installation prefix (the value passed to configure's --prefix flag, defaulting to /opt/local):

• Add ${prefix}/bin and ${prefix}/sbin to the start of your PATH environment variable so that MacPorts-installed programs take precedence over system-provided programs of the same name.
• If a standard MANPATH environment variable already exists (that is, one that doesn't contain any empty components), add the ${prefix}/share/man path to it so that MacPorts-installed man pages are found by your shell.
• For Tiger and earlier only, add an appropriate X11 DISPLAY environment variable to run X11-dependent programs, as Leopard takes care of this requirement on its own.

Lastly, you need to synchronize your installation with the MacPorts rsync server:

Upon completion MacPorts will be ready to install ports!

It is recommended to run the above command on a regular basis to keep your installation current. Type “man port” at the command line prompt and/or browse over to our Guide to find out more information about using MacPorts. Help is also available.

Git Sources

Can You Install Snow Leopard Without A Disk

If you are developer or a user with a taste for the bleeding edge and wish for the latest changes and feature additions, you may acquire the MacPorts sources through git. See the Guide section on installing from git.

Purpose-specific branches are also available at the https://github.com/macports/macports-base/branches url.

Alternatively, if you'd simply like to view the git repository without checking it out, you can do so via the GitHub web interface.

Selfupdate

Install Snow Leopard From Disk Image

If you already have MacPorts installed and have no restrictions to use the rsync networking protocol (tcp port 873 by default), the easiest way to upgrade to our latest available release, 2.6.4, is by using the selfupdate target of the port(1) command. This will both update your ports tree (by performing a sync operation) and rebuild your current installation if it's outdated, preserving your customizations, if any.

Other Platforms

Running on platforms other than macOS is not the main focus of The MacPorts Project, so remaining cross-platform is not an actively-pursued development goal. Nevertheless, it is not an actively-discouraged goal either and as a result some experimental support does exist for other POSIX-compliant platforms such as *BSD and GNU/Linux.

The full list of requirements to run MacPorts on these other platforms is as follows (we assume you have the basics such as GCC and X11):

• Tcl (8.4 or 8.5), with threads.
• mtree for directory hierarchy.
• rsync for syncing the ports.
• cURL for downloading distfiles.
• SQLite for the port registry.
• GNUstep (Base), for Foundation (optional, can be disabled via configure args).
• OpenSSL for signature verification, and optionally for checksums. libmd may be used instead for checksums.

Normally you must install from source or from an git checkout to run MacPorts on any of these platforms.

Help

Install Snow Leopard On New Hdd From Disk

Help on a wide variety of topics is also available in the project Guide and through our Trac portal should you run into any problems installing and/or using MacPorts. Of particular relevance are the installation & usage sections of the former and the FAQ section of the Wiki, where we keep track of questions frequently fielded on our mailing lists.

If any of these resources do not answer your questions or if you need any kind of extended support, there are many ways to contact us!