The DVD drive on my desktop Mac is broken, making it difficult to install the operating system. I wanted to put Leopard on this machine today, so I tried installing to the machine from my MacBook Pro.
Since Leopard is now Universal for both PowerPC and Intel, this ended up working nicely. The one note, however, is that installer will complain about the partition table when it's executing on an intel machine, but installing to a PowerPC disk. The installer thinks it'll be booting from the drive, so it doesn't like the Apple Partition Map, demanding a GPT table instead.
The solution is to set the CM_BUILD variable, allowing installation to the target disk.
export CM_BUILD=CM_BUILD
export COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL=1
export SRC="/Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD"
installer -verbose \
-pkg "$SRC"/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg \
-target "/Volumes/Macintosh HD 1/" \
-lang en | tee /tmp/installer.log
