Run virtualized Snow Leopard and Rosetta on Lion?

Some Lion users miss their older, Rosetta-dependent applications, which didn't make the cut in the latest Apple OS upgrade. However, a recent tip says that with a little effort — a download or two — it is possible to run Snow Leopard, the Rosetta Power-PC emulation libraries, and your older apps on a Lion machine.

In a recent post on Macintouch, reader Brad Kopernicus described the "simple" process. Using the VirtualBox 4.1 x86 virtualization software, he created a Snow Leopard installation on a Snow Leopard machine, and then made a virtual machine with no OS on his new  2011 Mac mini. With a bit of fiddling, he was able to get the Snow Leopard virtual machine running on the Lion system.

He then loaded applications into the VM and it worked, including Rosetta.

When I installed my first PPC program, the virtual machine downloaded and installed Rosetta. Then it let me install my PPC program -- it runs. Next I installed Appleworks 6.2.4, and that works, too. The Appleworks 6.2.9 smi updater does not mount, but I haven't tried anything other than a simple double click on that yet. I haven't done a lot of testing of my applications, but so far everything I tried has worked.

I am answering my question from August 1. I spent many many hours trying various approaches, but this way was fairly simple. I am very pleased to announce that it is possible to run Snow Leopard as a VirtualBox guest on the new 2011 Mini host running Lion, and the PPC applications work in Snow Leopard.