Upgrading from Panther to Leopard

I skipped Tiger. Waiting for Leopard has been like Waiting for Godot, and when Leopard showed, after lengthly, and poorly explained delays, I decided to upgrade from Panther post haste. Apple is apparently releasing Leopard relative to local times The Japan branch of the Apple Store notified me that I'd receive my copy around 6 pm on Friday, 16 hours earlier, than if I was waiting on Leopard in California. Way to go Apple! Usually those of us in Japan have to wait on Pacific Standard Time. In fact I just checked my email and got a confirmation message that my copy of Leopard had been shipped.

So this week I've been preparing the trusty Mac Mini for a Friday upgrade. Here's how:

1. Backed up my 10.39 version of Panther to an external HD. Thank you SuperDuper.
   
2. Cleaned out the iTunes library. First time I've done this. It was time to free up some disk space and get rid of songs I'll never listen to again.
3. Removed Panther versions of software like Quicksilver and Textmate. I use the free program, AppDelete to remove programs. I'll install the current versions after I upgrade to 10.5.
   
4. Ran the maintenance scripts via Cocktail.
   
5. Got out the install disk and run Disk Utility. A minor header error was identified and corrected.
6. Also ran the Apple Hardware Test--tiny icons, classic system 9 interface, no problems found.

That should do it. According to this post on MacRumors, the upgrade should take about 30 minutes.