Alrighty… AU$40 and two bus trips later later and I’ve now got MacOS X 10.6.3 installing.

Interestingly, this MacBook’s DVD drive seemingly does not like this disc.  Whilst waiting at the bus stop, I figured I’d fire up the machine and have a look at the disc.  Powered on, inserted the disc, the moment it got to the log-in prompt it spat the disc out.  Fine, maybe that’s a “feature”.  I log-in, then re-insert the disc.  It sits there for a bit longer then spits it out again.

Right, down I march back to the NextByte store where I bought it, cantankerous MacBook in one hand, receipt in the other to try and sort out this disc.  It was then the machine decided it loved the disc so much, it wouldn’t eject it.

10 minutes later in their service centre (no charge thankfully) they managed to extract the disc, re-insert it, and it was happily reading it at that point.  It was suggested that these machines do not like being moved when the disc is spun up.  Probably related to the angular momentum developed by the disc and fine mechanical tolerances owing to the form factor.  I looked at doing an install, but as I was walking down the street I did notice that the drive made the odd noise or two, so I decided discretion was the better part of valor, cancelled, ejected the disc and shut down.

Get home, placed the machine on a flat surface, and repeated the steps earlier.  It did the same “spit the disc out” stunt 3 times in a row.  I have it installing from an external DVD reader, which seems to be putting along nicely — and at least the disc won’t get stuck in this one.  I’ll investigate the internal drive later.

It happily accepted other discs, and if need be, I’ll burn a copy of the Snow Leopard disc as a working copy, at least then I’ve got the original if disaster does strike.  The good news is most of the stuff on this machine will be involving network traffic and not the DVD drive.  And I’ve been informed from two sources that the disc I have includes the Xcode IDE with gcc, so I should be able to put Gentoo/Prefix on next.

And I thought Macs “just worked”?