Is it possible to install Snow Leopard on an empty external disk or do I have to install Leopard first? Could I then use it as a startup disk? Also, is it possible to Install Snow Leopard without all of the extra foreign languages?
2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (Mac Mini),
Mac OS X (10.5.8)
The Snow Leopard disc doesn't look for a previous installation first. Go ahead and install on the external drive. As you go through the installation process you have the opportunity to fine tune your installation and not installing foreign languages is one of the options.
Do note that all foreign languages cannot be eliminated, nor can their associated .lproj folders. To remove the latter use something like Monolingual or this CLI script: http://forums.bombich.com/viewtopic.php?t=13509 (tailor it accordingly).
I did install Snow Leopard on a partitioned external drive (500 GB Mini Stack V3) and started up off of it. After start up I found everything normal except there were no icons on the desktop indicating any mounted drives. That seems a little strange.