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.