Since CD/DVDs are so retro and useless according to ol’ Job’sy, the concept of a hard copy of OS X Lion (10.7) is ridiculous.  I’m all for ease of use when upgrading, but I still prefer doing clean installs of operating systems when there are major updates.  In Google’ing it up combined with acquired Mac tricks, I’ve come across a way to burn a hard copy (bootable) DVD version of Lion.  It’s pretty easy actually, so that’s good, but to the ‘again, again’ crack squad of a marketing people at Apple, they should mention this.  Anyways, this is how you can do it…

Once you’ve downloaded OS X Lion, don’t install it just yet.

Open up Finder and go into your Applications, look for Install Mac OS X Lion (.app)

Right click on it, and click Show Package Contents, drill down into ‘Contents/SharedSupport’

Select InstallESD.dmg and Copy it (right click or cmd + C) and paste is elsewhere (I just put it on my desktop)

Now we just need to burn it to disk, so open up the Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility)

Click on the Burn Icon

Find where you copied the InstallESD.dmg file, everything else should be default
NOTE: You might have to drop the burn speed down if it fails

That’s it, should be set.

Hope this helped someone.  I still think that ol’ Job’sy should offer a hard copy option, until they’ve removed all cd/dvd drives for 2+ generations.

slainte