My first hackintosh
I’ve been hankering after a smaller mac for quite some time now after finding my MacBook Pro a bit too heavy to lug around all the time. I need to keep my MacBook Pro as my main day to day machine (FireWire, optical drive and 4Gb of RAM being the main reasons), so selling it to fund a new machine was out of the question.
I looked at both the MacBook (not much lighter than my MacBook Pro) and the MacBook Air (how much?!) but they were quickly ruled out. With Apple having decided that they aren’t going to sell me a small laptop for a sensible price, it became clear I needed to go down the murky path of the hackintosh.
I looked at the two main contenders: the MSI Wind and the Dell Mini 9. The Wind looked nicer, but not all the hardware is working correctly at the moment and it requires a hacked version of OS X making software updates a pretty tricky business. A Dell Mini 9 (stock model with a 32Gb SSD – I upgraded the RAM to 2Gb myself) was ordered and it arrived a couple of weeks later (side note: what on earth is up with that? I can order a custom configured XServe and have it here within 5 days!).
I booted it up once into Ubuntu (it took me all of 20 seconds to work out why I’m a mac user…), then got on with the installation procedure. I won’t go into the details here, but it went really smoothly, no issues at all. I followed the “Installing Mac OS X Using One USB Drive” method over at the excellent MyDellMini forums. I installed without any of the extra languages, printer drivers or X11 to slim down the OS X install. I also ran Monolingual after I’d installed all my apps to trim out any of the legacy PowerPC code that Intel macs don’t need.
Over all, the machine is very snappy considering it cost about 1/6 what my MacBook Pro cost. It’s not a speed demon or anything, but it boots very quickly and is more than capable of handling web browsing, mail and text editing (the holy trinity for me).
So, what works, what doesn’t?
All of the hardware I’ve tried (AirPort, ethernet, microphone) have worked perfectly. I’ve yet to try the VGA output or SD slot, but by all accounts they’re fine.
The default keyboard layout is the same as a mac keyboard (alt on the Mini is command, windows key is option etc). I’ve kept it like this since I’m obviously used to this layout, but it seems like it can be changed easily. The main issue with the keyboard is the size – some silly keys are really small (the full stop key being the main one I keep missing) – but that’s the price you pay for having such a tiny computer.
Two finger scrolling doesn’t work properly – there is an option to enable it within the DellEFI software, but it doesn’t work very well (very jerky, only works for scrolling down and not up) – so I’ve turned that off. Tapping to click and tap-drag work nearly as well as on the amazing trackpad on the MacBook Pro.
The default colour profile has a blue/purple hint to it. I installed this colour profile (copy the .icc file to /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays/ and then select it in System Preferences) and it looks fine – not perfect, it could do with more tweaking, but it’s not like I’m going to be running Photoshop on this!
Remote Disc works perfectly. I installed Office this morning using my MacBook Pro’s DVD drive and it went without a hitch.
Sleep when you close the lid works (although I recommend disabling safe sleep to recover a large chunk of your hard drive back – OS X saves the contents of RAM to the HD before sleeping, so in my case 2Gb saved), auto sleep (sleep after x minutes of inactivity) doesn’t yet. It is supposedly going to be in the next version of DellEFI (a painless process to upgrade – run the app, tick some boxes and type in your password). I’m now running the latest beta of DellEFI and auto sleep works fine for me – others are reporting problems though, so your milage may vary.
So, that’s it – a fully functional 9″ mac. I will update this post as my hackintosh experience continues.
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