The Hackintosh Post, Part 1

I mentioned in a previous post that I got a Dell Mini 10v, and successfully installed OS X on it. The Dell Mini 10v, if you don't know, is in the class of laptops called "netbooks" these days. It's a small, low powered laptop designed to be used mainly to surf the internet. The screen is 10 inches diagonally, and features a keyboard that's supposedly 93% of a full-size keyboard.

My laptop (a 1ghz PowerBook G4) is getting long in the tooth these days, even for standard browsing tasks. Even YouTube can overwhelm it, which is a bad sign. Perhaps a good reformatting would help it, but it's not winning my heart over with battery life either - about 40 minutes with mega dim screen brightness, tops. Sure, I could get a new battery...but buying a battery for equipment this old is starting to enter into the "vintage" territory, and that means it's going to get pricey for a new one. And a used battery...yeah, doesn't that defeat the point, sorta? So that's why I wanted a new laptop. And not to mention that sadly, finding PowerPC compatible software is slowly becoming harder and harder, which is way annoying.

Ordering it was a bit of a challenge. I wanted a solid state drive (SSD), for sure. When attempting to configure the Windows XP model with the 16gb SSD, the website complained that it wasn't valid for my operating system. So...yeah. On the Windows XP laptop, the SSD is not possible, despite being an option on the page.

Instead, I had to find the Ubuntu Linux version, which offers a whole different track of options. Here I could get the SSD, but the 802.11n wireless module wasn't available (g only). I decided I wanted the SSD over the n-wireless which I don't even have a router for yet, so I ordered the Ubuntu version. The configurator was really quite frustrating, as the whole point of buying it here was to configure it exactly how I wanted it. Oh well I suppose.

I also opted for the 6-cell battery, which in retrospect was an awesome move. Here's why - the battery life is ridiculous. It's rated for over 6 hours, which seems to be right in line with what OS X is estimating. I haven't used it that long to find out for sure, but in my usage so far, I haven't come even close to draining it.

Just for completeness' sake, here's the specs of what I got. Note that a large majority of netbooks sold these days use the exact same 1.6ghz Atom processor, which I was quite surprised to see.

• 10.1 inch glossy display (1024x576)


• Intel® Atom Z530 (1.60GHz/533MHz FSB/512K L2Cache)


• 6-cell battery


• 1gb ram


• 16gb SSD


• Bluetooth 2.1

Before I installed OS X, I wasn't terribly excited about the Dell-ified version of Ubuntu 8 that came with the machine. I thought being Linux, that I might be spared all the garbage that Dell ships with their machines - but not the case. The Firefox install had the Yahoo! toolbar, there was some shady "Dell support" option on the menu bar, and some other similar ghettoness. It lasted all of about 30 minutes before getting a fresh 9.04 install (which by the way, upgraded without any issues).

Installing OS X 10.6.1 was cake (after all, it's a piece of cake to bake a pretty cake), thanks to this handy guide from Gizmodo. After achieving a 16gb flash drive (I'm getting a stable of flash drives these days) it took a couple hours, but there weren't any major issues. The only issue that I find at this point is if it falls asleep on its own, it's a little flaky waking back up - i.e. it doesn't wake up. But I've been able to shut the lid and open it again, and it's ready to rock and roll. A minor workaround I'd say.

NOTE a large reason why I got the Dell 10v was the ease of Hackintoshing - for whatever reason, there's lots of support for it out there. I know other Atom-based netbooks are Hackintosh-able, but possibly not quite as easily as the Dell 10v.

And I considered sticking with Ubuntu - after all, given the usage of this machine, what's the point, right? Seems like Ubuntu might even be a better choice, assuming it's a little speedier on the admittedly limited hardware. However, I was swayed not only because OS X is awesome, but 1Password is awesome too. I know I've mentioned 1Password before, but if you forgot - it's a password manager for OS X that includes browser plugins and is generally awesome. Real easy, convenient way to improve your password security. I really want to get to the point that every password I use is generated by 1Password, and thus is mega long and complicated. Without 1Password, that's not going to happen.

That's the story of getting my Dell Mini 10v, now Hackintosh. I'll offer some thoughts on using the little guy in a future post.