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hacking a dell mini 9 to run OS X

Well, my Dell Mini 9 arrived.  I have spent the last few days trying to put OS X onto it and, despite what you might read, it was not all that easy to do.  I found that I had to use two tutorials: the one from Gizmodo, which was the clearest and probably the most helpful, the other one that was helpful was written by mechdrew on the MyDellMini forum.  I couldn't seem to get a CD drive to work on my Ubuntu loaded machine, so I used a single 8Gb flash drive that I partitioned.  I guess the question you want answered is, "was it worth it?"  All I can say is that it certainly was.  The Mini makes a perfect little Mac netbook.  It is fast, much faster than I expected, and nearly everything works.  In theory, according to the forums etc, everything should work, but in fact, I lose my cursor after every period of sleep (there are lots of problems with sleep, although most of them have been fixed) and have to restart the machine.  I can't seem to find any mention of this anywhere, so I am assuming that it has something to do with my particular setup.  The other problem for me is that the sound is not very good, lots of hisses and pops.  I am sure that I read something about this on my travels around the interwebsuperhighway, so am confident that I can fix it. Everything else just works!  In fact, there is a cool, oh, so very cool, feature that I did not expect and haven't read about anywhere: my machine is recognised as a Macbook Air for some reason, presumedly because there is no CD drive, and I now have access to the Remote Disc feature, which allows me to use any disc drive on the same network wirelessly.  It works brilliantly, and is quite possibly a good reason in itself to do the hack.


If you decide to have a go, I would be happy to offer the benefit of my experience.  Good luck.

UPDATE: after a bit of searching on MyDellMini forum I found solutions to both the audio and cursor problems.  All sorted now.  It really is a fantastic little machine.

mr mcmuffin on 5 Apr 2009 @ 02:30 PM ✲ Permalink

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