My new hackintosh
Welcome! I've had a lot of new people stopping by lately on account of my OSCON keynote. I'll be following up with a number of related posts, so if you're interested, you should subscribe to my RSS feed.
I recently acquired a Dell Mini 9 laptop and turned it into a Hackintosh using these instructions from Gizmodo.
The install was relatively smooth. Not 100% — I had to go through it twice in the end — but not bad. Here is the result: my hackintosh posing with my work laptop, a 15″ Macbook Pro.
I’m currently working on installing all the software I need to feel at home, and getting used to the damn apostrophe key being nowhere near where I expect it to be. The keyboard size, in and of itself, is fine, but the placement of some of the punctuation keys is driving me a little bit mad.
Here are my additional notes:
I used the USB stick install, no DVD drive. Where Gizmodo says Choose “80″ for the primary internal SSD I had to type “81″ instead.
When I upgraded using System Update, it took me to OSX 10.5.7, and then the DellEFI installer didn’t work properly, and I got into an unrecoverable (to me) state of wedgitude: the machine would boot to the grey apple logo, then it would get all these weird video artifacts, and hang. I had to start over on account of this. Second time through, I carefully downloaded the 10.5.6 combo update from Apple and installed that instead. Worked fine.
Wake from sleep wasn’t working. Googling around, stevenf’s hackintosh notes told me I had to disable “Legacy USB support” in the BIOS to make it wake from sleep correctly. I did this and it worked fine. However, I gather that “hibernate” doesn’t really work, so I’m going to have to be careful about not leaving things unsaved when I put the laptop to sleep for a long time.
I’m not very impressed with the battery life, but I hear 10.5.7 improves matters. I’m not going to try it right now — I’m off for a short trip tonight and don’t want to get the laptop wedged again — but I might try next week.
Another thing I’d like to figure out is whether I can manage dual boot with Ubuntu. I might find myself a bit tight on disk space, but I have the 32GB SSD and I’m sure it’ll fit, even if it does cut into my space for music and videos. If I start running out of room, I can always expand with an SD card.
Hackintoshing is, of course, in contravention of Apple’s Software License Agreement. All I have to say to that is: if Apple had a tiny, lightweight netbook available, I would be first in line to buy one. I say this as the owner of a Macbook (my third, counting work laptops), a Mac Mini, an iPhone, and a certain amount of fully licensed Apple software.
Comments are closed.
I used these instructions for mine:
http://dellefi.mechdrew.com/guide/method1.shtml
I get about four hours of battery life using an external mouse and the factory 16G SSD.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/3676700755
I also just today switched to the “US-Intl” keyboard, which is available from Dell’s parts department for $15 plus shipping. It has a more standard layout:
http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-hardware-upgrades/1348-replacement-keyboard-more-normal-us-intl.html
@Bill oh, that keyboard looks much better! Though I’m still annoyed by the placement of the tilde/backtick key, because I use Cmd-backtick a lot for tabbing within windows of a single app. Got a workaround for that, by any chance?
Remap the keys in OSX? Given the size of the thing it can’t be perfect, but the US-Intl keyboard is better than the “standard” one.
As someone who ran Windows XP on a borrowed MacBook for months while between ThinkPads, I am very amused, esp since 90% of my complaints were that the keyboard and touchpad with no second mouse button drove me INSANE.
@tiferet: You do realize that you can two-finger tap for a right-click on a MacBook?
I was wondering why I had two consecutive Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh entries in my friends page, but it appears from the comments here that this post must have triggered the other.
@Paul: Correct. 8-)
I am told by someone who tried that OS X was horribly show on their Mini 9, and they blamed the crappy SSD. I presume a fast (= expensive) SSD would make it shine. However, half the point of netbooks is that they’re cheap, and they’re cheap because they don’t use the quality parts that Apple favours. (And Apple is still notorious for early runs of a given model being lemons.)
@David: Running 10.5.7 on the Mini 9 with the Dell-supplied 16G SSD is faster than running 10.5.7 on a 1.25Ghz G4 Mac Mini at work with a 5400rpm hard drive.
Neither is a speed demon, but they’re both still very usable for “netbook”-type tasks.