O.K… I finally did it. I’ve been talking about getting a netbook to put Mac OS X on for awhile now. I have finally done it. I chose the Dell Mini 10v. Our friends at
Gizmodo have published a great
How to Hackintosh a Dell Mini 10v article on their website. I’ll be using that as my guide as I make my very own Mac OS X netbook. Side note: I’m going to mention all the steps, but leave out most of the how-to details as the Gizmodo website does a great job (pictures included) of giving you the nitty gritty.
Disclaimer: I understand that though I am using a perfectly legal copy of Snow Leopard, this does, in fact, violate the Apple EULA and though I’ve not checked, I’m sure the folks at Dell would frown upon this as well. There is also that small chance that something could go wrong during the install and brick my netbook. This all being said, I choose to move forward with the project.
Step 1 – Procurement
Procure a Dell 10v. I chose to use the
Dell Outlet website to get myself a refurb in order to save a little money. Signed sealed and delivered you should be able to get one on your door for less than $300.00. Keep an eye out for coupons and free shipping offers. Once the FedEx person arrives you will get to have a little unboxing party. Here’s what mine looked like.
You have the box itself, which is very light… This will be easy to carry around compared to the 15″ Macbook Pro. The basic “refurb” packaging, nothing fancy. Finally, the stuff (minus the power adapter which I simply forgot to add to the photo). Next we move to Step 2…
Step 2 – The Setup
I set up the Mini next to my Mac Pro station so that I would have everything I need in one place. Side note: Unfortunately, my nice 24″ monitor that I had died recently which is why you will see the old 20″ in the pictures (until the UPS man get here with my new one). Anyway, here’s the setup:
The first order of business is to make a bootable USB drive with the Snow Leopard Install Disk image on it. I will give you a hint – do this in advance. There’s nothing worse than having the Mini on the desk ready to go and waiting an hour for Disk Utility to do its work. You can use a flash drive (8GB or larger) or, as I did, you can use an external USB hard drive. I have a 100GB bus-powered drive at my disposal so I put it to use.
While Disk Utility is doing its thing I fired up the netbook going through all the Windows XP setup stuff just so it would be done and not cause any trouble down the road. With that out of the way, it was time to prep the BIOS of the netbook so that it would be happy to accept the drive Disk Utility is busy making.
Again details are posted on the Gizmodo site so I won’t bog you down with them, but here are a couple of pictures detailing my process.
With the netbook ready to go, we continue to wait for Disk Utility to finish up. Once it is done, it is time to run a handy little program that does the final prep on your boot drive to get it ready for action. You can find the file
here. I’m not sure entirely what it does, but it worked like a charm. Now it is time for the magic to happen…
Step 3 – Installation
At this point – with the mini off – you connect the USB drive and start up the mini. Provided you remembered to set the BIOS to start from USB instead of the HDD you should see this
From this point it should be a fairly typical OS X install with one small exception. This was even different from the Gizmodo post so keep it in mind should this pop up on your install. When OS X asks you where to install, obviously you want to pick the internal HDD, but I got the !Triangle and it wouldn’t let me choose it. Apple, being cool like they are, did give you the hint to launch Disk Utility which I did. I formatted the drive Mac OS X journaled quit Disk Utility and poof, it was ready to install. I chose the options I wanted and hit the install button…
Then it was more hurry up and wait. Honestly though, for a tiny little computer with only 1GB of RAM and an Atom processor, it didn’t take that long at all. When it is done you get this…
It started right up, the internal speakers worked great and the built in camera worked to set a picture for my account that was created during the setup. I immediately chose software update and got that going and when all was said and done I had myself a Mac OS X 10.6.1 netbook courtesy of Dell and some creative people on the web that figured all this out long before me.
I have removed the Windows XP and Intel Atom sticker and also used a silver Sharpie to color in an Apple sticker which nicely covers the Dell logo on the front of the computer. I’ve synced with Mobile Me and I’ll install DropBox soon to have access to all my stuff and I predict I will live happily ever after…
Cheers!!
