For the last few years I have been using a Mac Mini as my desktop; With Lion being released, and installed on my Mac Book Pro, now after using it for a while I want to use it on my mac mini as well; one of the annoying problems with it however is it requires 2 gigs of ram,

Although Lion shows up as available to install on the App Store, it returns an error when you try to install it

I tried to re-download OS X Lion on my macbook pro, but it knows that its installed already, and prevents you from re-downloading; however there is a work around, if you hold down the ‘option key’ (⌥) you can click on it to re-download.

After copying the install file to the mac mini, and trying to run it, the installer returns the following screen:

Telling me that MAC OS X 10.7 requires at least 2 GB of memory, which is still annoying since my mac mini only has 1 GB of memory; however this shows that the only thing the installer seems to be worried about is my lack of RAM…

There seems to be a  way around it, download a copy of Pacifist fromhttp://www.charlessoft.com/

Pacifist is a shareware application that opens Mac OS X .pkg package files, .dmg disk images, and .zip, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, and .xar file archives and allows you to extract individual files and folders out of them. This is useful, for instance, if an application which is installed by the operating system becomes damaged and needs to be reinstalled without the hassle of reinstalling all of Mac OS X. Pacifist is also able to verify existing installations and find missing or altered files*, and Pacifist can also examine the kernel extensions installed in your system to let you see what installer installed them, and whether the installer was made by Apple or a third-party.

Pacifist is not yet compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” so the next steps were completed on my Mac Mini:

The File you need to open is OSInstall.mpkg in the Install Mac OS X Lion (right click ‘Show Package Contents’) > Contents > Shared Support >

Jump to Resources, and click on the padlock in the top right

The File you need to edit is the Distribution File

Changing var minRam = 1048; to 1024, re-package the distribution file, and see if the changes help (here is my copy of OSInstall.mpkg.zip)

Now while I now get the following screen, suggesting I can now attempt the install

It returns the following error

I will have to have a look, and see if the hackintosh community can offer any help.