
So I've not been very good at keeping my promise to myself to blog regularly. So before I sleep tonight, I wanted to quickly post some notes from my experience converting my handy Dell Mini 9 to a sweet Hackintosh netbook (which I am typing this post on).
Firstly, I have been very surprised with the ease of the conversion. Aside from having to swap CDs constantly into and out of the portable DVD drive I stole from a friend, the installation was really pretty painless, although if would have been easier if I had opted for a larger SSD.
I started with the most basic Mini 9; no webcam, 512mb or RAM and only a 4gb SSD. Being an undergraduate student, and saving for a wedding, I had very little to invest in the project. I was very fortunate to have a valid, legit copy of OS X 10.5 laying around with nothing to put it on. There are versions which can be obtained online, but I do not recommend these, nor do I condone their use. That being said, this mod does violate the EULA for OS X, so please don't mention this to Steve.
To get this installed you WILL need at least an 8gb SSD. Being the cheapskate I am, I went on eBay and got an 8gb SSD that was pulled from another Dell Mini 9 for around $25. Also, I upgraded the RAM to 2gb, but I did that before I decided to install OS X, so that doesn't really count, right?
Wiggling the installation onto was the hardest part of the install, and good instructions on how to do this can be found here. After the install, I used Monolingual to free up some space. Afterwards, I've got a copy of OS X running great on an 8gb SSD with about a gigabyte of free space, which is more than I had with Ubuntu installed on the 4gb SSD.
All in all I am very pleased with how the project turned out. If nothing else, I've got a fun gadget that I can show off occasionally, and I get to use the copy OS X I had sitting around and get better acquainted with the OS. This mod is definitely worth a try. The biggest argument against using a Dell Mini 9 is the keyboard. Admittedly, it is pretty awful, although I have really grown pretty used to it. My next mod is going to be the US-International keyboard mod which can be found here. It provides a much more familiar keyboard to Dell Mini users. My favorite part, though, is that it is cheap.

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