iMac 6,1 from 10.5.8 -> 10.6(.6) -> 10.7

[jorawesome]

This question might have been asked (many times) before, but I can't really find an up-to-date answer.
I've got an iMac 6,1 with 2gb memory.
It's now on 10.5.8 but I would like it to be on OS X Lion (10.7). What's the best way to get there?
Can I "download" Snow Leopard and install it from 10.5.8, or does it need to be on external media (cd / usb) ?
And I guess that when I'm on Snow Leopard, it should be easy to get to Lion since Apple has released Lion to the public free of charge.

Thanks!

 

[Amethyst1]

You may be able to go straight from 10.5.8 to 10.7.5 because the Lion installer contains a full disk image that simply needs to be written to a USB flash drive (can be done in Leopard) to produce a bootable Lion installer drive.

 

[jorawesome]

Thanks, I'll try that! You think that I should boot from the usb instead of launching it on MacOS? It's not that I have valuable documents on that Mac, but Apple states that you should be on 10.6.6 in order to upgrade to Lion.

 

[Amethyst1]

You think that I should boot from the usb instead of launching it on MacOS?

That's how I'd do it.

Apple states that you should be on 10.6.6 in order to upgrade to Lion.

Do you want to upgrade to Lion, preserving your applications and documents, or perform a fresh installation, deleting everything that's on the iMac's drive and starting from scratch?

I don't know if you can upgrade directly from Leopard to Lion - you might have to upgrade to Snow Leopard first.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

If memory serves me correctly, when I was setting up my sons retro gaming imac, I had to install snow leopard first, then on to Lion. It was relatively painless. Just partition a large flash drive with two bootable partitions, one with Lion and one with SnowLeopard and put the respective dmg in each. Then you can boot from each by hitting the power button and holding Option to bring up the boot selector. Install Snow leopard, update and then install Lion. I made the same usb installer for my intel machines. It worked really well.