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