Also.... there will, in fact, be a physical manifestation of Lion. Starting in August, Apple will sell Lion on a USB stick for $69. Apple has also said that customers are welcome to bring their Macs to Apple retail stores for help buying and installing Lion..
And..
Once you have the installer application, you could (were you so inclined) dig into it (control-click, then Show Package Contents) and find the meaty center, a 3.74GB disk image (InstallESD.dmg, stored in the Contents/SharedSupport folder). You could then use that disk image to, say, burn a Lion installation DVD or create an emergency external boot disk.
Once you've selected the target disk, the Lion installer application will repartition the disk, carving out a 650MB slice of the disk for its own use.
Don't worry, all existing data on the disk will be preserved. (Mac OS X has had the ability to add partitions to existing disks without destroying any data for many years now.) All that's required is enough free space to reshuffle the data as needed to make room for the new partition.
And then...
The upshot is that after all the file compression magic added in Snow Leopard to reduce the footprint of the OS, Lion steals over half a gigabyte of your disk space as part of its installation process, and never gives it back. The partition's name makes Apple's intent clear: it's meant as a last-ditch mechanism to diagnose and repair a Mac with a hosed boot volume. (Hosed, that is, in the software sense; existing as it does on the boot disk itself, the recovery partition won't be much use if the disk has hardware problems.)
#561433 - 07/20/1103:23 PMRe: LION IS LOOSE!
[Re: MacBozo]
iBookmaster
WTF (Why The Face?)
Registered: 01/27/08
Posts: 1164
Loc: USA
My display seemed brighter right away. I see why now. The contrast has automatically been turned up in the Universal Access/Seeing section. I turned it back because it hides the separating lines in list view of the Finder. I also turned the scrolling direction back to the way it should be in Mouse System Preference.
_________________________ Well, until they make it right, I hope they never sleep at night. They better make some changes and do it soon. -Things Goin' On/Lynyrd Skynyrd
#561434 - 07/20/1103:29 PMRe: LION IS LOOSE!
[Re: MacBozo]
Acumowchek Is this thing on?
Registered: 12/30/07
Posts: 4208
Loc: Petaluma, CA
Yep! Resize from any edge! It's about %$^%$#! time! I'm at work right now, and MobileMe screen sharing is working beautifully. I may be at work, but I can still play at home! (Shhhh… Don't tell). I hope iCloud will be as easy…