Mid April comes and the tax return that was filed electronically in early January finally arrives. After getting some bills caught up and ahead, it is decided to take the plunge. I go to Sam's Club and purchase an off the shelf Dell Mini 9.
I get it home and order a 32GB Super Talent SSD and Kensington 2GB SODIMM RAM upgrade from Newegg.com for $111.49 delivered. Impatient to try the OS X installation, I try everything I can to get it to fit on the STEC 8GB SSD that came with the standard Windows XP installation. Alas, to no avail can I strip enough away from the retail DVD to get it down to size to fit in the space available on the GUID partition. That was fine because it would have been very frustrating to not have even been able to update OS X so that it could have booted without the Type11 USB thumb drive still attached.
When that failed, I reinstalled Windows XP, from the CDs that came in the box with the Mini 9 and the result for was a little surprising. The self-installed version of Windows XP actually outperformed the pre-customized one that came pre-installed. So, if you are a Windows only Dell Mini user and reading this page, you might consider starting from a blank drive with the discs that came with your computer. Anyway, I decided to keep the original 8GB SSD with a pre-configured Windows XP installation on it so that if I ever had to use that inherently flawed platform, out of sheer desperation, I could just quickly swap out the SSD drives and reboot.
Two days later my components arrived from Newegg.com. I was working for the Census Bureau doing door to door address canvassing. I had stopped by my house for lunch and quickly installed the two components. I took my Dell Mini 9 with me and started it installing at my first stop. I was at an apartment complex and the manager was not in so I had a little time to kill while I waited for her to return.
It took just 28 minutes to install, faster than it ever installed on my desktop Mini with an Intel CoreDuo processor. I rebooted in safe mode and installed the 10.5.6 upgrade. Then I installed DellEFI 1.2.a5 and restarted the Mini 9. Bingo, success we had the grey Apple startup screen with the black Apple logo with the spinning status graph below it. OS X was up and running and all components were all running just as they would on a MacBook Air.
I then install iLife 09 and iWork 09. Other than having to open Terminal to execute a Unix command to adjust the display scale to 75% so that I could launch each or the iLife and iWork titles and get pass their first run screens, every title runs perfectly. Aperture also installed and runs perfectly. FileMaker Pro installs and runs perfectly. As does the SDK for the iPhone. The same for Microsoft Office 2008. Quicken runs great with one exception: you cannot click checkboxes in the dialogue boxes that pop up with certain functions. I run Software Update and everything comes off without a hitch. I downloaded Microsoft Silverlight and am able to watch instantly viewable movies from Netflix, which I wasn't able to do on the Windows XP SP3 installation that came pre-installed on the 8GB Stec SSD.
OS X is running great and it believes the Dell Mini 9 is an original MacBook Air.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Getting Ready
I already had a 512MB thumb drive that was just wasting time in a drawer because it was too small to be of any real use any more, so I purchased two Toshiba 8GB thumb drives from Sam's Club for $19.99 each and a Toshiba 32GB SDHC memory card for $39.99, also from Sam's Club.
Following the instructions from the Gizmodo.com guide, I found the MyDellMini site and their OS X forum. There I joined the community and found the instructions for downloading and prepping my 512MB thumb drive with the Type11 Bootloader. I then used DiskTools to do make an image of my retail copy of OS X 10.5.0 and the restored that to one of the 8GB thumb Drives. I then made image files of all of the software titles Install discs I wanted to try and install on the Dell Mini 9, when I got it, and copied them to 32GB SCHC card (iLife, iWork, FileMaker Pro, Aperture, Microsoft Office, Firefox, Quicken, Toast, and Remote Desktop, so I could control all of my desktop computers around the house). I then installed Dell EFI, all necessary updates to OS X, and all significant updates to the software titles I was installing on the second 8GB thumb drive. This way I was prepared to have to abort the setup and installation process and start over however many times was necessary,until I was successful, without having to use an external DVD drive and a stack of discs.
Following the instructions from the Gizmodo.com guide, I found the MyDellMini site and their OS X forum. There I joined the community and found the instructions for downloading and prepping my 512MB thumb drive with the Type11 Bootloader. I then used DiskTools to do make an image of my retail copy of OS X 10.5.0 and the restored that to one of the 8GB thumb Drives. I then made image files of all of the software titles Install discs I wanted to try and install on the Dell Mini 9, when I got it, and copied them to 32GB SCHC card (iLife, iWork, FileMaker Pro, Aperture, Microsoft Office, Firefox, Quicken, Toast, and Remote Desktop, so I could control all of my desktop computers around the house). I then installed Dell EFI, all necessary updates to OS X, and all significant updates to the software titles I was installing on the second 8GB thumb drive. This way I was prepared to have to abort the setup and installation process and start over however many times was necessary,until I was successful, without having to use an external DVD drive and a stack of discs.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Long Before Purchasing My Dell Mini 9
Back around Thanksgiving I started reading about the Netbook category of the portable computing market. I saw it as one step closer to my dream of the ultimate PDA/mini computer. At the time almost all of the units available came only with one version of Linux or another and it required some extreme geek knowledge, web mining and quality tech support time to get them up and running. This was from people who were paid to do to nothing more than play with latest gadgets and do whatever it takes to get them working. But, the sunny side to all of this was that all over the world there were forums popping up detailing how many of these inexpensive computers, that were intended to rebirth the Internet appliance, were being loaded up with Mac OS X, with relative ease and doing far more under OS X than they were ever envisioned to achieve under Linux or Windows XP.
I was intrigued. And as I dug into the specs on a lot of these netbooks I soon discovered why. Many of these neat, light little wonders had very similar specifications as the Mac Intel Mini sitting on my desktop, and, for that matter, the early Intel-based MacBooks. The current, and soon to updated iterations of OS X still support these platforms so installation only requires overcoming the barrier of the few missing drivers for the minor variant hardware items. Some groups were having great success. Those who favored the MSI Wind platform enjoyed great success and many others were able to cobble their success into successes for their favored platform as well.
Then entered the Dell Mini 9 whose specs were so similar the the original Intel MacBooks that you could even install off of a retail Leopard install DVD and use Software Update without breaking the installation. The only barrier to overcome was that the Dell lacks Apple's native hardware EFI, so a software boot loader, native to the Dell BIOS, would force OS X to boot. Other than that everything worked, everything.
I then found the Gizmodo.com instructions for turning a Dell Mini 9 into the ultimate Mac OS X Netbook from a link in a sidebar on the MacWorld website and was ready to give it a go. So, I started collecting the necessary items. I already had a legal copy of a retail Install DVD of OS X 10.5.0 because I already own other Apple branded computers and had purchased it to upgrade them from Tiger (10.4) and I had lots of OS X compatible software to test out once I had my HackBook Mini up and running. All I needed was a couple of USB sticks, an off the shelf Dell Mini 9, a 2 GB SODIMM (because no matter what anybody says about 1 GB being okay, I know as a Mac guru OS X gets a big performance boost at 2 GB), and a SSD upgrade (because the off the shelf units come with the 8 GB SSD and OS X won't fit).
I wasn't able to swing the Mini 9 until income tax returns come in, so I got everything else in order. I got the USB thumb drives and prepped them. I saved the Gizmodo instructions as a PDF file, just in case Apple pulled a cease and desist order like they have to some other sites out there on the Internet that give instructions on How to make a netbook run OS X.
I was intrigued. And as I dug into the specs on a lot of these netbooks I soon discovered why. Many of these neat, light little wonders had very similar specifications as the Mac Intel Mini sitting on my desktop, and, for that matter, the early Intel-based MacBooks. The current, and soon to updated iterations of OS X still support these platforms so installation only requires overcoming the barrier of the few missing drivers for the minor variant hardware items. Some groups were having great success. Those who favored the MSI Wind platform enjoyed great success and many others were able to cobble their success into successes for their favored platform as well.
Then entered the Dell Mini 9 whose specs were so similar the the original Intel MacBooks that you could even install off of a retail Leopard install DVD and use Software Update without breaking the installation. The only barrier to overcome was that the Dell lacks Apple's native hardware EFI, so a software boot loader, native to the Dell BIOS, would force OS X to boot. Other than that everything worked, everything.
I then found the Gizmodo.com instructions for turning a Dell Mini 9 into the ultimate Mac OS X Netbook from a link in a sidebar on the MacWorld website and was ready to give it a go. So, I started collecting the necessary items. I already had a legal copy of a retail Install DVD of OS X 10.5.0 because I already own other Apple branded computers and had purchased it to upgrade them from Tiger (10.4) and I had lots of OS X compatible software to test out once I had my HackBook Mini up and running. All I needed was a couple of USB sticks, an off the shelf Dell Mini 9, a 2 GB SODIMM (because no matter what anybody says about 1 GB being okay, I know as a Mac guru OS X gets a big performance boost at 2 GB), and a SSD upgrade (because the off the shelf units come with the 8 GB SSD and OS X won't fit).
I wasn't able to swing the Mini 9 until income tax returns come in, so I got everything else in order. I got the USB thumb drives and prepped them. I saved the Gizmodo instructions as a PDF file, just in case Apple pulled a cease and desist order like they have to some other sites out there on the Internet that give instructions on How to make a netbook run OS X.
Welcome
I am an extreme Mac OS X devotee. I am a master PC/Windows desktop and network technician who wants nothing to do with Windows in my real life. My dream world would be to have a complete existence that never touched a non-OS X experience, but alas, I don't have the wealth of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, so in the real world that I move in, I have little other choice. Since, Steve and the boys in Cupertino won't give us a compact, inexpensive computer that will work with everyday tasks and surf the web almost everywhere we go, I had to resort to making one of the best I could find bend to the best operating system available. I am now using my second Dell Mini Netbook and can offer a little bit of advice on how to shortcut the path to a fast, smooth, almost out of the box, up and running experience.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
