oh, by the way...

Mrs McMuffin loves my machine and has tried to claim it for her very own.   She is particularly pleased that she doesn't have to learn another OS.  Babycake even made a bid for it too.  He became very agitated with me when he first saw it, and claimed that it was a "boy 'puter" and he insisted that it was his 'puter.  I have managed to fight them off, but I don't know for how long I can keep it from them.

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.